In which the pond is bored by Polonius gone full Pauline and the Angelic One terrified of AI, but still has to send sundry alternative reptiles to the cornfield ...

 

Regarding the bromancer outing yesterday, the pond deeply regrets not having got up early enough and so be able to slip in a reference to the great Hydeing doled out to Nige in the Graudian 

Reform’s genius plan is finally coming into view: field terrible candidates then lose (the pond added an intermittent archive link because the Graudian is playing that 'give me your email game' again)

Every time the pond reads a Marina hatchet job, the pond wishes it had the skill, or at least that she'd turn her sights on the reptiles.

...The other increasingly noticeable thing about Farage is that he is incredibly thin-skinned and can’t help showing it. Remember, he spent the first part of this campaign in sulky seclusion after people found out about him taking a totally normal personal gift of £5m from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire. When he finally emerged to talk about it, he couldn’t keep his nuclear irritation and affront under wraps. This is very Nigel. The commentator Dominic Lawson recently recalled Farage’s reaction to a mild joke at some Spectator awards last winter, describing his face turning white before he shouted: “Why don’t you go f*ck yourself?” Why do you keep f*cking yourself, feels like the more salient question for Farage. (* the pond apologises for making the text googlebot safe)

The cracking Crace was also relevant ...

Burnham the mystic with a mission is all smiles after Makerfield coronation (again the pond added an intermittent archive link because the Graudian is playing that 'give me your email game' again)

It was mainly about Labor delusions but at the very end Nige got a mention as being election MIA ...

..One other person not much in evidence was Nigel Farage. This had been a terrible night for Reform. If Makerfield had voted as it had in the May local elections, Kenyon would have won with a majority of 8,000. Burnham’s victory showed the country was not hellbent on putting Reform in Downing Street. Still, at least Nige hadn’t spent any of his £5m handout on the campaign. So things weren’t all bad.
Instead, Farage made do with a sulky video, yet again made in a field. He’s always in a field these days. The only place he can be sure no one will ask him awkward questions about his slush funds. He had been expecting a disappointing night, he said. He really hadn’t. Not this disappointing. “Reform is still the leading party of the centre right,” he added. Except it isn’t. There is nothing centre-right about Reform. They are much further from the middle than that. Something more than half the Makerfield voters understood only too well.

Instead of those pleasures, the pond's dismal meditative Sunday duty was to spend time with prattling Polonius.

On the other hand, the pond overdid it yesterday, so at least it'd be a quiet time with Pauline and Polonius, as the tedious Mr Pooter clone was determined to carry on the One Nation-isation of the hive mind at the lizard Oz.

The header: GetUp’s anti-Hanson stunt another own goal; The organisation that spent $600,000 trying to stop One Nation in the Farrer by-election handed the party leader one of her best political moments yet, at the National Press Club.

The caption: A banner was unfurled behind Pauline Hanson during her National Press Club speech, and right GetUp media lead David Sharaz. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

Polonius spent a bigly four minutes of his prattle conclusively proving he lacked a sensa huma, though whoever imagined he ever had one clearly hasn't read a word he's written.

That banner sliding down was mildly amusing and faintly diverting, and nothing to get excited about, but Polonius was determined to be outraged.

For the pond the moment had a faint whiff of that Banksy moment when the image slid down through a shredder at the auction, though with Pauline it was the minions doing the shredding and the tearing ...

For Polonius it was time to get hot and bothered, recant his criticism and embrace his inner One Nation ...

In World Cup football terminology, I would score the recent political contest at the National Press Club in Canberra as Leftist Sneerers 0, Pauline Hanson 3.
Ever since Hanson arrived on the political scene in the lead-up to the 1996 federal election, I have always taken the One Nation leader seriously. Sure, in her early years in politics, I was critical of Hanson on many (but not all) issues. I still am.
But it was always apparent that she stood for something and that, although at times inarticulate, she was a good communicator.
After a nervous stumbling start at the NPC, Hanson soon settled down. This occurred around the time the stunt by the leftist GetUp organisation went into operation. A poster critical of One Nation’s position on industrial relations was unravelled along with a reference to Hanson accepting an increase to her parliamentary salary.
The latter was the result of the fact, having won the Farrer by-election, One Nation was entitled to have minor party status, resulting in a pay increase for its leader. Most employees, if offered pay increases, accept them.
Hanson’s vote in the Senate will never affect the decisions of the Fair Work Commission, which determines pay and conditions for most workers. Moreover, there is a strong case that the labour market should be more flexible to facilitate employment and productivity, as was in the case in the final years of the Hawke-Keating government.
Hanson’s response to the GetUp stunt was controlled as she spoke about the cost of living in general and child poverty in particular. At the end of the lengthy speech and before the Q&A began, the following exchange took place between Hanson and NPC president Tom Connell: “Connell: Thank you, Senator. Just in case it needs clarifying, we had no knowledge of what happened here. Hanson: Just tell me, is this another first? Connell: It’s, I believe it is. I believe it is. Hanson: I’ve got a lot of firsts in my life.”

In keeping with Polonius's uxorious scribbling, the reptiles then jumped the shark and nuked the South Park fridge: Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain videos first aired in 2021 and the series is in its fourth season. Its animation style is sometimes compared to South Park.

Um, no, the animation style is nothing like that of South Park's, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone would have a good case for a defamation action.

The wretched Pauline efforts can be found on YouTube but damned if the pond will link to them for fear of provoking an action claiming damages for nausea.

The vague way the defamation is couched gives a clue to the nonsense behind it: Its animation style is sometimes compared to South Park.

Sometimes? By whom? Citation needed so that they can be enjoined in the action. 

Oh no, you don't mean to suggest that further down the page Polonius will...say it ain't so ...

Meanwhile Polonius was still in the grip of uxorious yearnings and euphoria ...

The response demonstrates that Hanson can be quick and sharp. Quicker and sharper than some journalists in the room who were not contenders for best on the ground. Especially Sarah Martin of the leftist Guardian Australia who directed a question about Hanson’s daughter, Lee Hanson, who works for a NSW One Nation senator from her home in Tasmania. Apparently, Martin does not understand that some staff in national politics work from home.
As mentioned previously in this column, as recently as February, ABC TV’s Linton Besser referred to Hanson as a “one-time peddler of fish and chips from Ipswich”. In her NPC speech, Hanson chose to remind viewers/listeners that she “actually ran a small business”.
In The Saturday Paper on May 16, GetUp executive director Paul Ferris wrote: “Over the six weeks up to May 9, GetUp spent $600,000 campaigning against One Nation in the Farrer by-election. Then we lost, badly.” An own goal to be sure. Followed by another at the NPC on Wednesday.
One Nation can prevail over the smart-alecs in GetUp like David Sharaz, who is alleged to have activated the anti-Hanson poster. The party’s most difficult opponent will be the Labor Party.
On the morning after the NPC speech, Labor sent out perhaps its most talented headkicker – Queensland senator Murray Watt – to criticise Hanson.
Now that Hanson has laid down a range of political positions across several social and economic issues, the likes of Watt will have an increasing opportunity to challenge her in detail.
It’s a task more suited to Labor than the extremist Greens or some of the leading figures in the Coalition who do not resemble the likes of opposition figures such as Malcolm Fraser, John Howard and Tony Abbott.
Over the years, One Nation has experienced significant problems with poor candidate selection and staff appointments. Speaking to Paul Sakkal on Nine’s Inside Politics podcast recently, Hanson conceded she closed four branches because of the presence of what I termed, writing in The Australian in 1989, the Lunar Right.

Just to make sure that Pauline kept up her hive mind profile, the reptiles slipped in yet another snap... Hanson and her primary adviser and chief of staff James Ashby at the NPC. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Does she look like Martin Luther, or is it him? Please, Ughmann, help ...

And then came the big reveal ...

Hanson told Sakkal, “I’m being infiltrated by these extremists; so it’s all the time happening with One Nation, they set us up all the time.” That’s the downside. The upside is that Hanson’s chief of staff, James Ashby, who has a background in the LNP in Queensland, is one of the best political operatives going around.
One Nation’s social media by far outperforms its political rivals. Moreover, it can be quite funny. Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain videos first aired in 2021 and the series is in its fourth season. Its animation style is sometimes compared to South Park.

So it was Polonius doing that line ... Its animation style is sometimes compared to South Park.

And yet there was still no citation, no mention of the 'somebody' doing the 'sometimes' routine. (Could it have been 'anybody' talking about 'anytime'?)

Unless ... eerie music please maestro, perhaps it was Polonius trying to disguise himself as that somebody because it seems that Polonius liked the animation, as well as Gutfeld!'s comedy stylings ...

Hanson’s Please Explain is produced by Stepmates Studios in Melbourne – which is co-founded by Mark Nicholson and Sebastian Peart. Nicholson, who is a regular guest on Sky News’ The Kenny Report, has a fine sense of humour. What’s different about the Nicholson approach is that he laughs – not sneers – at his opponents. It’s much the same in the US where Fox News’ Gutfeld! program now has more viewers than any of the other late night talk shows.
The program sometimes errs with respect to taste, but it is invariably witty. Most of its targets are left-liberals (in the American sense of the term) but Greg Gutfeld and his guests sometimes laugh at conservatives.

Dear sweet long absent lord, is this what happens to elderly folk in their dotage, as they sit and watch Faux Noise and cackle about owning the libs?

Seems so, and it seems that Polonius thinks this is pretty sophisticated stuff ...

One Nation’s appeal is regarded by many media commentators as essentially attracting Australians in rural and regional areas, who do not have as many tertiary qualifications when compared with Australians in the city, particularly inner-city types. This is broadly true. But not entirely.
There is evidence that many professionals and well-educated Australians have become attracted to One Nation because they are disillusioned with the two-party political system.
After the South Australian and Farrer results, plus Hanson’s NPC appearance, One Nation’s performance will be subjected to greater scrutiny. Labor will be looking to take back lost supporters on social issues, while the Coalition will focus on economic matters where its strength lies. It’s a long way to go before Hanson is likely to return to the NPC and to the next election.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

The lizard Oz is now so far up Pauline's fundament, Polonius leading the way, that there's now no chance of sunlight.

Luckily the pond had saved an infallible Pope to celebrate Polonius's singalong ...

On the upside, thus far it hasn't been about the United States ...

And that thankfully was that, and all that was left to do was search for a bonus.

The pond won't have a bar of going off to Gondwana land with Gawenda...

COMMENTARY by Michael Gawenda
Jewish voters abandon Labor for Pauline Hanson's promised land
A constituency that once considered the One Nation leader unthinkable has become one of her most surprising sources of support.

If you're all in on ethic cleansing and a greater Israel, it sort of fits, as the Hansonofication of the rag rolls on apace.

And what to make of fools that seem to think that to defeat the Hansonites you must become one?

‘Wokeness is the enemy’: Labor’s Godfather fights to hold the centre
Senator Don Farrell has rebuilt himself into one of Anthony Albanese’s closest political protectors – and most powerful cabinet figures. Can he help Labor stem the rising tide of One Nation?
By Ben Packham

Sheesh, with this attempt to imitate the Swiss bank account man, the pond instantly achieved woke enlightenment ...

Here you go anti-woke Don ... swill on this ...

The pond ruled out Cameron on the basis that he was days late to the party where folks dissed the deal ...

DANGEROUS PEACE

Art of the bad deal: inside Trump’s ‘horrific’ surrender to Iran

How Trump's Iran ar ended in a weak pace deal for America

Critics from both sides of US politics have savaged President Trump’s peace deal as a surrender, granting key concessions before nuclear negotiations even begin.

By Cameron Stewart

Chief International Correspondent

Been there, done that ...

The pond also ruled out snappy Tom ...

Hanson’s Make Australia Monocultural Again sees migration fight shift from ‘how many’ to ‘who’
Unfortunately for Labor, the Coalition and reform advocates, the caravan has moved on – but are we ready to sort people by colour, creed and race?
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist

Sure, it was a valuable contribution to the Hansoning of the Daily One Nation Oz News, but there's only so much a bear can take.

The pond feared that snappy Tom might have provoked the pond into conducting a campaign to deport any and all of those currently working in any form for foreign owned News Corp, especially as all snappy Tom could come up with at the end was a fudge of the first water:

...Unfortunately for Labor, the Coalition and reform advocates it may be too late; the migration caravan has moved on. The conversation has shifted to questioning culture and values, while narrowing the definition of who can come to work, study and settle here. That ultimately leads to pulling apart decades of non-discriminatory policy, sorting people by colour, creed and race. Are we ready for that?

Okay, that's more than enough. Deport all workers beavering away for foreign owned News Corp!

The pond also ruled out the lizard Oz editorialist, providing a faint echo of the bromancer:

It's a funny old world when the reptiles are on the side of Sir Keir.

The pond left Sir Keir for reasons best explained by Owen Jones in The Graudian ...

This column does not express support for Palestine Action – here’s why
In Britain’s increasingly authoritarian society, any sort of protest can find itself at odds with the law. You might even go to jail

...Once a movement committed to non-violence has been designated as terrorists, then a Rubicon has been crossed. “Terrorism” has been emptied of any real meaning, and can be applied far more widely. Indeed, earlier this year, more than 70 peaceful protesters were arrested at a demonstration organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC). None of this was direct action: they were deemed to have breached arbitrary restrictions by marching down Whitehall clutching flowers commemorating Palestine’s dead. The PSC leader, Ben Jamal, is among those being put on trial.

For an expansion of this, check out Parker Molloy ...

One of my favorite comedy sketches of all time is 2007 bit from The Whitest Kids U’ Know called “It’s Illegal to Say…” If you’ve never seen it, do yourself a favor and watch it before you read the rest of this.
The whole thing is Trevor Moore, sitting on a stool in front of a blank backdrop, delivering the most deadpan public service announcement you’ve ever seen. “Did you know,” he asks, “that it’s illegal to say ‘I want to kill the president of the United States of America’? It’s a federal offense. One of the only sentences you’re not allowed to say.” And then, of course, he spends the next minute saying it, over and over, in increasingly elaborate forms, while insisting the entire time that he’s only informing you that it’s illegal, not actually saying it
By the end he’s talking about mortar launchers and the best vantage point for hitting the White House and an “illustrated diagram,” each one “extremely illegal,” “ridiculously, horribly felonious,” and he’s letting you know all of this purely as a public service. The comedy is in how straight he plays it. He’s not winking. He’s basically your local news anchor warning you about a scam...
...Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom
Moore’s sketch was a joke about a country that would throw you in prison for the shape of a sentence, no matter what you meant by it. Britain has spent the last year running the real version.
Last June, activists with a group called Palestine Action broke into RAF Brize Norton and sprayed red paint on two military aircraft. That’s the kind of thing the group does, mostly property damage aimed at weapons manufacturers and military sites tied to Israel’s war in Gaza. Broken windows, spray paint. Days later, the British government, under the control of the Labour Party, proscribed it under the Terrorism Act 2000, which made it a crime not only to belong to Palestine Action but to “invite or recklessly express support” for it. The ban took effect at one minute past midnight on July 5, 2025. It was the first time a direct-action protest group had ever been classed as a terrorist organization in the UK, which dropped it, legally, into the same bucket as ISIS and al-Qaeda.
You don’t have to like Palestine Action to see the problem. Spray-painting a plane is a crime, and Britain has laws against that already. What it didn’t have, until last summer, was a rule that made it a terrorism offense to say out loud that you back the people who did it. Even the UN’s human rights chief, Volker Türk, called the ban a “disturbing” misuse of counterterrorism law.
And look at the word in the statute: recklessly. The whole fight in Elonis was over how sure the government has to be about what’s in your head before it can punish you for your words, and the Court raised the bar. Britain set a very, very low one. Reckless is enough.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. People have been arrested for holding cardboard signs that read “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” One of the first taken in, on the day the ban took effect, was Rev. Sue Parfitt, an 83-year-old retired priest. At a single demonstration in Parliament Square last September, the Metropolitan Police arrested 890 people, 857 of them for supporting the banned group, the biggest mass arrest London had seen in decades. At an earlier protest, nearly half of the people arrested were 60 or older, and fifteen were in their 80s. More than 3,300 people have been arrested across the UK since the ban, according to Amnesty International. Terror-related arrests jumped 660% year over year, and 86% of them were tied to supporting Palestine Action. A law written for terrorists, used mostly on pensioners with poster board.

On the other hand, we're still not talking about King Donald ...

...and the pond decided to keep it that way by turning to the Angelic one, sounding very Catholic about AI ...

The header: Gen Z has become measurably ‘dumber’ than its predecessors across every cognitive domain; Alarming studies show AI may have already fatally corroded this generation’s ability to really think and, more important, to discern.

The caption: Pope Leo warns it’s necessary to ‘disarm’ AI but digital companies headed up by the likes of Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have already softened up Gen Z’s brains for even more AI. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

Each time the pond looks at an increasingly appalling reptile collage, the pond thinks that the case for AI gets stronger. 

Well done, Emilia, you've provided a fine reason for a bot to replace you.

As for the Angelic one, she was all in with the Pope, as Catholics are wont to be ...

Everyone is talking about AI. Most commenters, including Pope Leo, are trying to discern the wider economic and social effects.
However, a lot of people in the scientific world, and perhaps a few in the education establishment, are worried about the already observed effects of the digital revolution on Gen Z (born about 1997-2010) and the obvious portents for the following generations when AI really takes over.

But then the reptiles slipped in a snap that conclusively proved that AI and stock images might not be the answer... A Deloitte report revealed Gen Zers spend more than 41 hours a week consuming digital entertainment and 61 per cent say they watch more user-generated content than traditional movies or TV shows.

Sheesh, just looking at that image, the pond went temporarily blind and felt its IQ drop a hundred points, in a way that even watching all series of Friends couldn't manage.

However, it got the Angelic one going...

Some alarming studies have surfaced showing AI has already had a disastrous effect.
Some neuroscientists have concluded Gen Z is measurably “dumber” than the previous generation. If true, it is the first time in human history this has happened.

Every generation seems to have one or more of someone coming along to wage war on the younglings, as Horvath did in his testimony, and the pond is inclined to believe him when it comes to the United 
States of America, anyone dumb enough to elect King Donald not just once, but twice, is truly in the stupid zone.

The only problem is that you can't blame King Donald on the younglings ... but do go on ...

According to neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, who recently testified before the US Senate, test scores seem to prove it, showing Gen Z underperforms Millennials (also known as Gen Y) and Gen X across almost every cognitive domain: attention, memory, literacy, reading comprehension, numeracy, executive function and general IQ. Horvath described it thus: “It’s not just one weak spot … that’s the whole dashboard blinking at once.”
According to Horvath, the reason for this cognitive and intellectual decline is over-reliance on AI, particularly in classrooms.
Horvath blames digital technology being embedded into American classrooms. But this is not just an American phenomenon, it is worldwide, and Australia is not far behind. Videos and quick summaries have replaced reading, ChatGPT has replaced extended research and writing, screens have replaced human-led learning, bullet points have often replaced essays.
What this research tells us is that modern learning environments may be weakening the deep-thinking “muscles” humans once built naturally through reading, struggle and slow thinking. Digital environments train the brain to skim, not to think deeply.
This affects kids’ ability to really think but, more important, to discern. Snicker if you will about the silly young ones, but ask yourself: Why is it that a whole generation has been so easily bamboozled into bizarre notions such as the trans movement, or to believe that some facts of history, like the Holocaust or the Hamas attack on October 7, might not have even happened?
We have already seen some of the negative emotional impacts of the digital revolution on this generation, and there is a worldwide scramble to do something. The favourite “something” is to ban smartphones and social media for under-16s.
But we have lost the battle because digital companies have already softened up Gen Z’s brains for even more AI, not just with dodgy digital content, which is bad enough, but the way they do it.

To get the pond onside and make sure that it had a bout of nerd nausea, the reptiles showed off their snap of the Zuck ... Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaves court after testifying in February. Picture: AFP

Don't get the pond wrong. The pond has never been on Facebook, and rarely uses a phone and has a sense of the younglings' plight ...

But the pond isn't sure that believing in mythical cults of the Catholic kind is a way to shore up opposition to the bots ...

A recent sensational case in the US has produced an important ruling. The court found Meta and YouTube liable for harms, not for content, which is what keeps parents up at night, but because of the product designs themselves: aggressive algorithms, infinite scroll, autoplay and so on. This distinction between content and product design is often missing from analysis.
At first there were all sorts of reasons to account for this cognitive decline: Covid, poor teaching, lack of discipline, migration and language problems. Most of these factors are real, and some of them are propelled by parents and teachers also hooked on AI.
But none of this can explain the worldwide phenomenon. Declining academic performance is not just in the English-speaking world.
However, on the bright side, some psychologists have theorised that the tests are no longer fit for Gen Z. Standardised tests measure only certain types of cognition, and Gen Z does have great strengths in digital fluency, the ability to grasp technical aspects of AI. So on one level they have skills that make them technically prepared for the new world of AI industry, even if by cognitive intellectual measurements Gen Z kids seem less smart than previous generations.
Amber Beynon, a research fellow at Curtin University’s school of allied health, did a study about AI and screens and childhood development that refutes the doomsday scenario because AI is already shaping how young children interact with technology, from apps to interactive toys. Beynon claims: “The learning capacity of these AI technologies is at the next level – it’s incredible how it can personalise interactions from one child to another and remember interactions … it can benefit child development.” The problem is: What “benefit to child development”? And is this really education?

At this point, the pond had a temporary seizure ... ‘The whole dashboard blinking at once’: Gen Z underperforms Millennials and Gen X across almost every cognitive domain: attention, memory, literacy, reading comprehension, numeracy, executive function and general IQ. Picture: Mario Tama/Getty Images/AFP

That's not helpful, that's meaningless.

At least up your visual game so you don't use AI or a stock image library to spank the bots...

And here's the real problem.

The Angelic one somehow thinks that Leo is going to be able to stem the Grot Gemini Chat GPT tide, divert that rogue Sam Altman Open AI tide, or grapple with Anthropic ... as they sidle up to Wall Street and the Pentagon...

The pernicious effect of AI on young people’s emotions and moral capacity is real, because they think AI is real. Sometimes it seems weirdly so. Chris Olah of Anthropic at the launch of Magnifica Humanitas said. “We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling … structures that mirror results from human neuroscience … internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease.”

Uh huh, and some old codgers tell them Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny is real, and that there's a god who checks up on everything they do every moment of the day, and that masturbation will transport them straight to hell, without stopping on Go for a good time.

Olah’s address at the Vatican is the most important from within the tech world on the moral and cultural, not merely economic, implications of AI.
Gen Z’s thinking skills might be useful in many areas, but the type of thinking that can cultivate the ability to make moral decisions, deep thinking that lends itself to philosophy, might already be fatally corroded by the use of digital technology in this generation.
This is why Pope Leo has warned it is necessary to “disarm” AI, to separate the human from the machine. Current research into Gen Z’s thinking processes might indicate that we have already lost this battle.

Does the Angelic one know just how woke she sounds, how alarming she is to the likes of red wine-swilling Don?

And so to end with other pleasures ...

In which the bromancer Brexits on endlessly about Britain, and the Ughmann takes to the Catholic Freudian couch for endless confessions ...

 

By focussing on the lizards of Oz, the pond misses out on many moments of sublime stupidity.

There's Bret Stephens in the both siderist NY Times on 24th March ...

The War Is Going Better Than You Think (* intermittent archive link)

And there he is on 16th June 2026 ...

Iran Found Trump’s Bone Spur (*intermittent archive link)

Relax, it's still going better than you think, and Stephens is there to save the day. It was a right and just war, and the debacle had nothing to do with him, he and other neo cons were just betrayed.

Anyone wanting to find someone who wanted to make the bromancer look like a marvel of consistency and insight couldn't do better than evoking Stephens' wondrous ability to get it wrong.

Speaking of the bromancer, he was at the top of the far right world early in the weekend, safe in his retreat into battering the British, as if his celebration of Brexit had done no harm to that wasteland.

This was just as well, because the One Nationisation of the rag continued at an alarming rate ... and lordy, long absent lordy, the reptiles seemed to think that a Brexit down under might be a jolly good thing, though who we might Brexit from left the pond a tad bewildered.

It was a newbie to the pond, one Nicholas Jensen, allegedly the lizard Oz's commentary editor, and clearly a man of such infinite stupidity that he intended to leave Stephens and the bro in his wake ...

The pond wasted nine precious minutes of its life and still didn't discover who we were supposed to be Brexiting from ... so a teaser trailer will suffice ... and the intermittent archive can do the rest...

Here you go ...

The revolution that began with Brexit has arrived — and the establishment is powerless to stop it
One Nation has done what a decade of stagnant politics could not: made Australia’s body politic feel tremulous, urgent and dangerously alive.
By Nicholas Jensen

To get to the Hansonite meat, and a hint of what a Hansonist Brexit might mean, you had to endure a lot of Nick blathering about his time in England in Brexit days and when you finally arrived, it was simple-minded peak capitulation to One Nation and Pauline ... showing just how deep the One Nationisation rot has set in to the rag ...

...Like MAGA and Reform, One Nation is fuelled by similar laments for the loss of a certain kind of society. It is galvanised by animus and grievance, yet it is striking to observe, as many commentators have since the Farrer by-election, that these sentiments are often simultaneously expressed in an atmosphere of celebration and euphoria. As with most populist movements, the sense of loss exists in an intimate relationship with a spirit of hope and revival. That tension is vital to understanding One Nation’s rising support, and the appeal of its leader, Pauline Hanson.
Hanson is dismissed as having few skills beyond the virtues of plain speaking and authenticity, but that analysis misses a deeper, more salient point. Hanson understands the vernacular of patriotism intuitively; she speaks fluently in the language of values and culture in a way the vast majority of the political establishment cannot. This, perhaps more than anything else, is Hanson’s most formidable asset, her deadliest weapon. She has made it her own and wields it boldly, as evidenced in this week’s National Press Club address.
One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson calls out the Albanese government’s lies during her National Press Club address. “The government is not telling the truth; the Prime Minister and the Treasurer are desperate, and they keep saying that anyone who opposes the budget measures is opposing the opportunity for young people to get into housing,” Ms Hanson said. “Another lie, but how else do you describe it?”
Whenever Anthony Albanese and his colleagues talk earnestly of “progressive patriotism”, the public senses its superficiality. Deep down they suspect it is an ersatz version of patriotism. Increasingly, they see Hanson as offering the real thing. When the Prime Minister says, as he did last week, while attempting to explain the dramatic poll surge for One Nation, that “it’s the economy, stupid”, he wasn’t merely regurgitating a hackneyed political cliche. He was effectively surrendering the battlefield of culture and values to Hanson.
Just now, the shape and character of Australian politics is changing beneath our feet, perhaps forever. Like the populist ruptures that roiled and electrified Brexit Britain and Trump’s America a decade ago, One Nation has injected a new intensity and urgency into our body politic. A stagnant political culture, long starved of big ideas and obsessed with its own material abundance, suddenly feels tremulous and dangerously alive.
Nicholas Jensen is The Australian’s commentary editor.

That's not commentary, that's moronic adulation ...

If the reptiles keep this sort of nonsense up, they'll discover what it's like to be the dog that finally caught the car ...

As for the bromancer, it's always best to remember that he was there for the ruination of Britain by Boris and sundry other frauds, and so to begin the bromancer coverage with another flashback ...

Wait, there's more, even if the steak knives are stuck somewhere in customs...

Brexiteers fighting for liberty and the people’s will
This stoush symbolises a version of the clash of forces playing out in some measure in every main Western democracy.
By Greg Sheridan

And so on, and the pond apologises for dragging that mouldy old cat out of the grave.

Enough of these preliminaries, time to get down with it, with Count Binface, foxes, raving loonies, and the bromancer, and it helps to retain a sensa huma...

The header: The battle for Britain as civil wars rage on left and right; Even left-wing magazine The New Statesman has declared it a ‘failed state’.

The caption: British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, left, with Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham during Mental Health Awareness Week. Picture: Getty

If it's a failed state, where are the bromancing Brexiteers to take the credit for helping conjure up that failure?

Health warning: this is a nine minute read, and it's a real struggle.

The only upside is that it isn't about King Donald and his hapless dealings with Iran, or any of his internal ructions, or even about such follies as the greening and dissolution of the reflecting pool.

The bromancer has realised Faux Noise has made the disunited states a disaster zone, and so he's taken comfort and refuge in the disaster sometimes known as little Brexiting England ...

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has won a huge victory in the Makerfield by-election, winning more votes than Reform UK, Restore and the Conservatives all combined.
He will now march to Westminster and the prime ministership.
Keir Starmer is destroyed. Like Macbeth assassinated by Macduff, the march from Burnham Wood spells doom for Labour’s king.
Equally significant, and completely unforeshadowed, was the Conservatives’ win in the Aberdeen South by-election in Scotland, which they took from the Scottish Nationalists.
This is a heroic breakthrough for Kemi Badenoch. It’s the first electoral victory for the Conservatives under her. It’s the first time the Conservatives have won a by-election in five years.
It’s proof, in the only currency that really counts, that Badenoch’s leadership can deliver votes to the Conservatives. It’s a huge boost for the Opposition Leader.
Burnham will take the leadership and get a honeymoon, which may well be short-lived as the problems he will face are intractable if approached from the left, raising the prospect of an early election, though such an option is full of risks. Badenoch is back in the contest in a big way.
Nonetheless, the underlying contradictions remain.
Britain is a nation in terrible if hopefully temporary decline, while two fierce civil wars are being fought before the Great War of the two opposing trends of British society comes into full conflict.
Whatever the turbulence following this week’s by-elections, the structures of deep British division have been building for years and could well explode.
There’s a civil war on the left and a civil war on the right. Like all civil wars, it divides families. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the immensely urbane, courteous and decent former senior cabinet minister under Boris Johnson, the soul of the conservative Conservative, finds that his teenage daughter has joined Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

As the Moggster will later return, can the pond please borrow from John Crace, who described him as "the idiot's idea of a thinking man", as in Rees-Mogg breaks broken news to a horrified house:

...Next up was Jacob Rees-Mogg, the idiot’s idea of a thinking man, to provide details of the Commons’ business for the coming week. “The government is committed to leaving the EU on October 31st,” he smirked. And how was it planning to do this? By debating the environmentally friendly way to give a cockapoo a haircut and introducing legislation to force the French to drive on the left-hand side of the road. That way there might be fewer delays at Calais post Brexit.
Of the withdrawal agreement bill there was no sign. “They seek it here, they seek it there,” Rees-Mogg laughed, working himself up into a state of visible arousal at his own Divine Comedy. For a man who used to pride himself on his sincerity and probity, lying and S&M cosplay have become second nature. He must have a very accommodating arrangement with the priest at confession.
There’s civil war on the left side of politics too. The UK Greens are the most extreme left-wing green party in the democratic world. Their leader, Zack Polanski, one of the weirdest political leaders in captivity (he was previously a hypnotist who thought he could enlarge women’s breasts), is seriously challenged for the leadership because he’s too “pro-Zionist”. But these are bagatelles. Both civil wars involve the biggest political battalions.

Ancient history, and so it's back to the idiot thinking he's in the company of a thinking men ...

Keir Starmer and the fight on the left
On the left, Keir Starmer is a dead Prime Minister walking. His party, with a landslide majority, is in a mess. All the challengers, Andy Burnham and the others, have accommodated the idea of moving further to the left.
But there’s a raging civil war on the left. Labour’s primary vote is low, way behind the right-wing Reform. A strong challenge to Labour is being mounted by Polanski’s Green Party. The UK Greens are extreme and repellent. They differ from the Australian Greens in one key respect. They’ve become the quasi-Islamist party. The Greens are not only the party of inner-city middle-class white radicals, like most Green parties, they’ve become the party of Islamist solidarity and rage.

The reptiles flung in a snap ...Sir Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham at Old Trafford in May. Picture: Getty

Thank the long absent lord the English retain a sensa huma and that the second season of Ludwig is due in August ...

It can't be that bad. That furry suit must have cost a motza ... and as for the lavish expenditure on the dust bin and the silver cape, it's a country full of luxury items...

At the recent local elections the Greens won more than 440 new seats, to take them to more than 1350 in total. They could steal dozens of Labour seats at a parliamentary election.
The left’s third big force is the radical nationalists. In the devolved “home nations”, left-wing separatist nationalists rule – the Scottish Nationalist Party in Edinburgh, Plaid Cymru in Cardiff and Sinn Fein in Belfast. Each is committed to leaving the UK. Rees-Mogg fears the next election could deliver a “Frankenstein coalition of Labour, the Greens and the Nationalists”.
The SNP would have great leverage. Scotland could realistically break away from the UK. Vast social change, structural political and power transformations, could be enacted to make reversal of left hegemony extremely difficult. The stakes are astronomical.
Reform and the battle for the right
But equally there’s a life-and-death civil war on the right. Kemi Badenoch is doing a spectacularly good job leading the Conservatives. But the party is still a long way behind Reform, and in many polls Labour as well. It holds 116 of 650 House of Commons seats. Informal estimates suggest in an election today it could lose a third of them. And that’s with a popular leader.
People are re-examining the 1930s classic The Strange Death of Liberal England. The Liberals had been a giant political party – of legends William Gladstone, Herbert Asquith, David Lloyd George. Yet they were eclipsed and politics became primarily a fight between the new Labour Party and the Conservatives.
The party threatening to displace Tories today is Farage’s Reform, which is populist, dynamic, growing its membership rapidly (270,000 members now) and has been leading national polls for more than a year.
But Reform itself is being challenged on the right by the new upstart party Restore, led by Rupert Lowe, 68, a former businessman who was previously elected as a Reform MP. Many of Restore’s policies are much the same as those of Reform and the Conservatives but its rhetoric is frequently more extreme. There are reports that white supremacists and neo-Nazis donate to Restore.
Lowe and Farage fell out spectacularly and their personal enmity is an important dynamic of politics now. Restore could score enough votes to cost Reform dozens of parliamentary seats in Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system.
Nonetheless, some pundits believe an election today would make Reform the biggest party and the Conservatives the second largest, with the two forming a governing coalition. However, there’s every chance the right’s divisions, lack of a deep organisational base and supportive institutions, not least government institutions, could cost it government.

The reptiles added to the burden with AV distractions ... Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage claims the British public is increasingly aware of a “two-tier Britain”, adding that the country now faces a profound “trust issue” with its politicians. “You haven’t just got an economic crisis, you haven’t just got a social crisis … but you’ve also got now a trust issue,” Mr Farage told Sky News host Paul Murray. “People don’t trust politics, people don’t trust politicians. “After the awful cases, the attempted beheading in Belfast, the horrible death of that young student in Southampton, people now realise we’re living in two-tier Britain. “We’re now being judged by our ethnicity and some groups are treated with more favour than others. This is really, really serious; there couldn’t be anything more divisive in society.”

There couldn't be anything more divisive than Nige, which is why a sensa huma and a British appreciation of irony is essential ... (do Reform and Restore ever play the Monty Python splitters game?)

First, how fair is it to say the UK is a nation in decline if not crisis, and there’s every chance of things getting worse?
For a start, this is a judgment widely shared in Britain itself.
Consider left-wing magazine The New Statesman. It detests Tories, Reform and right-wingers, it typically backs Labour governments. It listed a cover story recently under the heading: “The failed state”. On its cover ran the strapline: “Everything is broken. Nothing changes. Voters are mad as hell.”
British welfare spending has run completely out of control. It now exceeds the total revenue generated by income tax. The unemployment rate fell this week by 0.1 per cent to 4.9 per cent. That seems modestly encouraging. But there are a million youngsters, aged 18 to 24, engaged in neither employment nor education or training. While unemployment dropped a tiny fraction, the actual number of people getting pay dropped by tens of thousands.
Britain has a national debt roughly equivalent to its gross national product. It pays nearly twice as much on interest as on its defence budget. This is partly because of the debilitating effects of a plainly insane welfare system. Two people living together can, if they shrewdly maximise their benefits, receive the equivalent of more than £70,000 ($131,700) a year in welfare, twice the average wage. That’s a huge disincentive to work. The welfare bill is projected at £400bn by decade’s end.
Sick and tired
Through the week a doctor recounted in the press serving for years on panels reviewing people’s claims to special benefits. One rule for a maximum benefit was not being able to walk independently for 20m. He would watch people park their cars 100m down the road, walk jauntily to their interview, state they were unable to walk 20m and receive maximum benefits. People can claim mental distress on Zoom interviews. Social media schools them well on what to say and typically they get the benefits. Much of this is an unresolved hangover from disastrous Covid measures.
The breakdown of the traditional family has fiscal consequences. On any given day there are 13,000 people, who are not sick enough to be in hospital but for whom there are inadequate care arrangements at home, occupying hospital beds in the UK. Almost everything the family once did, the state now does, but it does it at enormous cost and very badly.
Britain has been definitively unable to control illegal immigration. In the 12 months to March this year, 44,000 immigrants arrived illegally. Nearly 100,000 asylum-seekers are accommodated in hotels or group houses paid for by government. This greatly angers local residents. It also angers those trying to get social housing. It’s one of the main issues driving voters directly from Labour to Reform.
Britain has also gone backwards on defence capability. It had a full-time professional army of 170,000 under Margaret Thatcher, 100,000 under Gordon Brown and just 70,000 today. John Healey resigned as defence secretary last week because Starmer, having failed to make puny savings in the welfare budget, could not secure adequate funds for defence. Al Carns, the armed forces minister who also resigned, wrote: “Britain spent a decade choosing to be smaller in the world.”

And at this desperate moment the bromancer revealed he was part performing pundit, part tourist and part player, and not much of a journalist ...

I spent many hours this week in London’s clubland, around Mayfair and Piccadilly, exploring the civil war on the right. At Mark’s Club in Mayfair I met James Orr, the head of Reform’s policy unit. It’s extraordinary Reform can attract someone such as Orr. He is simultaneously associate professor of philosophy of religion at Cambridge University.
I find these London clubs full of mysterious narrow corridors, quaint and poky spaces, walls decorated with spectacular paintings and an atmosphere of remarkable good cheer. Whether for reasons of privacy, or to spare members witnessing an act of journalism, Orr and I speak in a small, curtained space.

At this point, the pond should note that Orr is barking mad, and a loon who move in the Peter Thiel/JD Vance circle of couch-molesting weirdness.

For some ore on the real Orr, try... James Orr and the Messianic Transatlantic MAGA Alliance Trying to ‘Save’ Britain
Peter Jukes and Nafeez Ahmed reveal how James Orr, Nigel Farage’s new head of policy is the key religious and ideological linkman for Palantir’s Peter Thiel and Sir Paul Marshall’s GB News

...the story of Dr James Orr, the lawyer turned theologian, sits at the centre of a clandestine transatlantic nexus of faith, finance, think tanks, seminars and seminaries, media companies and conference events — and an apparently catastrophic view of politics.

The reptiles then showed a revealing snap ...The writer Greg Sheridan with James Orr, head of Reform’s policy unit, at the Marks Club of Mayfair in London. Picture: Supplied

Was that the best they had? 

The bromancer looks terrible, awful slumped over posture, eyes barely open, ragged and depleted, as if entering end times, making the pond wonder if any mockery was worth it, as nature ravaged the man...

Second thoughts, he's still poisoning the well ...

Orr is an immensely smart guy. Attracting folks like him is a big part of Reform’s momentum. He lists the five key issues driving support for Reform: immigration; rejecting net zero; crime and justice; the dispossession of the working class and of working Brits generally; and the need for (qualified) pride in Britain’s history and culture. He makes two devastating analytical points about these issues: “The trends are our friends. None of these problems is going to be solved by a Labour government.” His second point is even more devastating.
Much of the mess in these issues was caused by the Conservatives in their 14 years in government. Theresa May took the insane step of legislating a hard net-zero target by 2050, which has given Britain the highest domestic energy prices in the world.
Voters had been hugely motivated to take back control of immigration. This was a vital factor in the Brexit vote that saw Britain leave the EU. Yet in one year under Johnson, in the post-Covid rebound, just under a million immigrants arrived.

In the nick of time there came a relieving AV distraction ... Andy Burnham said Labour had a “final chance to change” after his decisive win in the Makerfield by-election set up a showdown with Sir Keir Starmer. Allies of Mr Burnham called on the Prime Minister to hand over power after he defied national trends to increase Labour’s share of the vote in a seat where Nigel Farage’s Reform UK made sweeping gains in last month’s local elections. The Prime Minister has insisted he will not quit and will fight any leadership challenge.

The bromancer kept mining this Orr for loony ore ...

All this leads Orr to emphatically reject any kind of deal with the Conservatives: “No. Not at all. We are doing at least as well in Wales, and in Labour heartlands, where the Tories have never had a presence. And I don’t think more than a handful of Tory MPs really believe in their hearts what we believe, policies like withdrawing from the European Court of Human Rights.”
Such European entanglements have prevented Britain from running the kind of border control policies that enjoy settled bipartisan support in Australia. Orr’s message on the Tories is simple. They had 14 years to deliver on these issues but they governed more like a moderate Labour Party than as Conservatives. Badenoch herself once said to me that the problem with the Tories in their last term in office was that they “talked right but governed left”.
Orr outlines a wide range of Reform’s proposed spending cuts, everything from civil service numbers to foreign aid and the whole vast panoply of net zero subsidies and expenditures.
If Reform does gain government, its vulnerabilities will be psychodramas, personality clashes and a general lack of people who know how government runs. But its intent is clear: the root-and-branch transformation of British government and society.
Tories still in the hunt
Yet the Tories are by no means out of the hunt. Badenoch is the most popular political leader in Britain. She is passionately committed to ending net zero, withdrawing from the ECHR, combating identity politics, restoring pride in British history – all the things Reform wants. And she pushed for these when she was a Conservative minister.
Rees-Mogg, one of the most impressive Conservative thinkers (who lost his seat at the last election), argues for a Conservative-Reform electoral alliance. He is the most charming and courteous of men and explains his thinking to me over lunch at the more staid Boodles Club near Piccadilly (though in accordance with club rules, our formal interview takes place off-site).
He points out that if you extrapolated the local elections to national results, you would see Reform on perhaps 27 per cent and Conservatives on 20 per cent. Aggregated, that’s potentially landslide territory for the right. He thinks the two parties should avoid running against each other, with each concentrating on their geographic zones of strength.

A most impressive thinker? Perhaps for the idiot's idiot ...

Cue another John Crace sketch from ancient times...

Rees-Mogg's dim brand of banter entertains no one but himself
Leader of the house’s unctuous insincerity fails to hide the fact he hasn’t a clue what’s going on

...Since joining the cabinet, lying has become second nature to the leader of the house. Power has corrupted him and what integrity he might once have had is now shot. Everyone knew that Saturday’s possible emergency session was entirely dependent on whether Johnson agreed to desperately negotiate himself back to a permanent Northern Ireland backstop with a customs border in the Irish Sea – the prime minister is one of the few people who could haggle the price up in a carpet shop – to give himself a deal on which the Commons could vote and save him the embarrassment of having to “die in a ditch” by writing an extension letter to the EU.
But time and again Rees-Mogg argued otherwise. “Oh, no, no, no, no,” he said, chuckling to himself while oozing unctuous insincerity. “The honourable member had referred to ‘running a bath’ when surely he meant ‘drawing a bath’.” Weirdly, Rees-Mogg labours under the impression that this kind of bantz is clever. One can only imagine he rewatches his greatest hits on the BBC’s Parliament channel alone at night in a state of mild sexual arousal. Whatever gets you off.

Ancient times, ancient Moggie follies.

Cue a snap of the Moggster lad with his squeeze, Jacob Rees-Mogg and wife Helena arrive as far right activist Tommy Robinson addresses the Oxford Union at the Oxford University on June 17. Picture: Getty

It was beyond time for the bromancer to wrap up proceedings, and to reveal that he was in fact a contra player and performer rather than a journalist ...

Something similar was done at the 1918 election, in an alliance of Liberals and Conservatives, in a successful bid to thwart Labour.
Why are people so ready to abandon the traditional parties?
Rees-Mogg: “People feel they haven’t had sensible governments, or governments that take notice of them. They feel that they’ve had governments which are more concerned with international agreements and which have not stood up for them (the British people).”
You get the sense that British politics can’t go on as it is because the nation is being governed so poorly. But there is a fundamental contradiction between the left-wing view of Britain and the conservative view of Britain. The clash will get more intense. Inevitably there will be some compromise and some qualified results. But I get the sense there is big political conflict ahead, and that over the next five to 10 years one side of this argument or the other will prevail convincingly.
Man the battle stations.

Man up? Junket up ...

Greg Sheridan is in London to appear as a panellist at next week’s ARC Conference. Flights were included in the invitation.

At least it was a different kind of swamp ...

What else?

Well for the sake of completeness, the pond should report that the dog botherer was this week performing Australian Daily Zionist News duties...

Bondi lit the fuse’: The massacre that turned middle Australia against the political class
The attack has reshaped the landscape, but major parties haven’t grasped what is coming.
By Chris Kenny
Associate Editor (National Affairs)

The pond suspects a greater Israel is coming, with the ADZN cheering on the ethnic cleansing.

It's there at the intermittent archive for those who want it, but the pond preferred as a bonus the alarming prospect of the Ughmann in a sadomasochistic fervour about a good caning ...

The header: Urge to correct the wicked and improve the good has moved from classroom to cabinet room

Smoking is merely one of a growing catalogue of habits, preferences and personal choices that governments have decided require official supervision.

The caption for the weird illustration: There are large and small campaigns against vaping, drinking, gambling, plastic bags, plastic straws, gas appliances, petrol and diesel cars, wood heaters and excessive air travel.

This Ughmann outing took a bigly six minutes, and indulged his tragic habit of dwelling in the past, so that the hive mind could play the role of shrink, and watch as he lay on the couch and unburdened himself of traumatic childhood memories.

The tedium of it all ...

Education was different in the 1960s and 70s. In some ways better and in some ways worse.
One of the ways it was worse was the routine flogging of children, sometimes for no apparent reason. All manner of weapons were deployed for this task, from sticks to canes to leather straps.
Being an army brat who moved every two years during primary school, I encountered all these tools of torment in the education systems of Queensland (Brisbane, then Townsville), the ACT (twice) and South Australia. Routine interstate moves also highlighted the foibles of federation because, much like rail gauges, each jurisdiction had decided to chart its own course on everything from school holidays to handwriting.
Each had its own cursive writing workbook where you had to carefully copy the local Platonic ideal of each upper and lower-case letter and were flogged for deviating too far from the norm.
There were some similarities between states but more than enough differences to make it easy to fall at the hurdles of running writing. A lot of the trouble revolved around the correct way to render the lower-case “r” and “f”, as there were three different takes in three different states. Arguing that you had just mastered the loop on the left of the “r” in Townsville was met with scorn in the Adelaide Hills hamlet of Woodside, where no such loop existed. There was no dispensation for delivering a perfect South Australian “f” in Canberra, where the NSW cursive bible ruled.
By the time our family arrived in the ACT in 1971, having passed through the education systems of Queensland and South Australia in the space of a single year, my handwriting had become an ecumenical litany of letters, some of my own invention.
A Catholic boys primary school in the early 70s was no place for innovation. I got an inkling of what was in store when Mum took my older brother and me shopping for the school uniform. The only good thing about the SA public school we had just left was the lax dress code, where students could wear civvies like jeans and T-shirts.

The pond trusts this Freudian indulgence has helped the Ughmann, as the pond bit its tongue about its time with the Dominican nuns, and a snap revealed where all this was heading ...The state’s determination to rid the nation of smoking has pitched excise duties so high they have spawned a thriving black market in contraband fags.

Smoking! Shades of the IPA's glory days.

As the Ughmann has set the Freudian pace, here's a few pond memories. 

Smoking managed to kill off one grandfather with lung cancer, in a way that the Somme trenches hadn't managed. Lung cancer also killed off the other one. 

Emphysema killed off the pond's father, and made his final years a living hell by way of an inability to breathe. The pond can still vividly remember another uncle dying of COPD, struggling, gasping, as he tried to suck in air, only to fail at that task a few days later.

Since then the pond has taken the view that the cost of tending to people doing themselves harm should always be factored in to the equation.

It's not about their health, it's about the cost they inflict on others, much the same as if you decide to drive on the wrong side of the road, take out assorted vehicles and people, and expect insurance will save you from any penalty.

Nah, many might be in the insurance pool, but we also have a duty to ding you for your naughty ways.

Meanwhile, there's still more personal stuff from the Ughmann to endure before we get there, as the pond idly wondered if the Ughmann still kept smoking, still kept doing himself self-harm, and had begun to be ravaged by all the diseases smoking can give you. Did he ever use public health care? Or did he have the decency to pay for private insurance and burden like-minded chums/

Never mind, he really is the perfect example of a mind ruined by Catholicism ...

By contrast, Marist Brothers Canberra had decided the primary school uniform had been perfected in Edwardian London and we were required to wear a ridiculous short-brimmed cap born on the cricket grounds of England. It served no useful purpose in an Australian summer beyond being a place to sport the metal badge bearing the school crest. The rest of the outfit was a shirt and tie, a blazer, shorts and long socks.
The blazer seemed to hail from Oxbridge rowing clubs, and the shorts and long socks were drawn from an age when exposing a boy’s knees to sub-zero winter days was deemed character-building.
In the 70s, Marist College enforced its dress code with military rigour. Floggings for uniform violations were routine. Punishments flowed if your cap was askew or missing a badge, if your tie was not straight, if you did not have elastic garters to hold up your socks, and all these fashion crimes were measured in blows counted from one to six of the best.
Uniform misdemeanours were just the tip of an iceberg of infractions for which the rod was liberally employed. If some anonymous crime was discovered, the culprits were told to out themselves or risk collective punishment being dispensed to the whole class.
At least one of the brothers understood that the punishment of the innocent with the guilty required an explanation and excused it with the aphorism that it “makes the good boys better and the bad boys good”.
Perhaps that was true for some. What it did for others, like me, was develop a kind of criminal genius for evading capture and a firm conviction that the burden of proving any alleged malfeasance rested with the prosecution.

And where did all this lead? Yes, to that pathetic delusion of boys that somehow smoking was exotic, and made them the summit of masculinity and charm, bad boys on the prowl, looking for bad times, or more likely, tragic nerds wondering if a smoke might end their incel days ...

One moment is etched on my memory. Being the 70s, some of us were committed smokers by early high school and engaged in this most illicit of pleasures wherever we could.
There were several places around the school grounds where you could smoke unseen, but taking risks was part of the fun of it.
One morning the PA crackled to life and there was a school-wide message from the principal.
“Yesterday on the bus to Rivett some boys were seen smoking,” he said. “We have your names. If you come down to the office now I will go easy on you. But if I have to come and get you then the consequences will be much worse.”
I watched in amazement as two boys stood and volunteered themselves for the gallows. I thought, “If you have got my name you can come and get me.”
No one ever came.
We now live in more enlightened times when it comes to the management of children. Though sparing the rod does seem to have spoiled more than the odd child, I would not endorse a return to the era when terror was considered an essential teaching aid.
The larger problem now is that state and federal governments have decided to infantilise us all, with all manner of legislative encouragement to ensure we make better choices and become better humans in service of the state.
The same urge to correct the wicked and improve the good has moved from the classroom to the cabinet room.
The state’s determination to rid the nation of smoking sprang from the laudable aim of preventing unnecessary deaths. But in pursuing that goal the federal government has pitched excise duties so high they have spawned a thriving black market in contraband fags that is hosing money into the coffers of organised crime.

The reptiles introduced a snap to remind the hive mind that this was an IPA/big tobacco view of the world ... Tobacco smugglers have been stripped of more than 2.5 billion cigarettes and thousands of tonnes of tobacco at the nation’s borders, costing the federal government more than $4 billion in lost duty.

How they've fought every step of the way, from labelling to availability, all so they can kill of their customers, but not before bleeding them dry ...

The Ughmann continued his crusade, with the pond wondering whether he might get on to crusading about the urgent need to liberalise the availability of crack and other forms of cocaine, with perhaps a little heroin and morphine for good measure (how unfair that the pond has to head to hospital to get a shot of morphine. And where are the soothing gummies?):

The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that about 80 per cent of tobacco consumed in 2025 came from illicit sources, up from 12 per cent in 2017, which is a policy triumph only if the aim was to hand the market to criminals.
Any sensible government would recognise this error and correct it. But no, like a temperance crusader who mistakes every unintended consequence for proof that he has not gone far enough, the state remains committed to the cause.
Smoking is merely one of a growing catalogue of habits, preferences and personal choices that governments have decided require official supervision.
There are also large and small campaigns against vaping, drinking, gambling, plastic bags, plastic straws, gas appliances, petrol and diesel cars, wood heaters and excessive air travel.
The problem is not any individual measure. It is the cumulative effect. Everywhere you turn there is some government, regulator, department, authority, commission, agency or taxpayer-funded activist hectoring you about how you should live, what you should drive, what you should eat, how you should heat your home, how much water you should use and how often you should fly.

From the desire to kill everyone with lung cancer or other diseases related to smoking, the Ughmann manages to turn himself into a terrified fear monger, alarmed on many levels ...

The state is restlessly seeking new ways to intrude in our lives.
In the UK the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government, says to help achieve stringent new climate targets Britons will have to eat 25 per cent less meat. In a statement from the British Energy Minister’s office the public is assured these targets will succeed “without telling people how to live or behave”.
That, of course, is a lie. The state will find ways of making Britons comply in the task of saving the planet one vegan burger at a time. It is already succeeding by conjuring an economic environment in which many people can’t afford meat.
We are now living with the soft despotism Alexis de Tocqueville feared was the destination of democracies.

Hang on, hang on, it's the British government that's conjuring an economic environment simply to deny punters  meat in their diets?

What does the Ughmann make of King Donald and his minions, devoted climate science denialists all, who nonetheless have managed to produce a spike in meat prices?

Soaring US beef prices likely to rise further thanks to trade tensions and disease outbreaks

You don't have to accept climate science to cause a rise in beef prices, but the reptiles carried on being alarmed ...In Australia, a Climate Change Authority report says shifting from red meat to other protein sources could help reduce emissions. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Eek, a meaningful snap of a moo cow, which might fit into the pond's thesis on the place of moo cows in cinema (cf Twister)

In the final gobbet, the Ughmann successfully managed to carry on like a pork chop ...

In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville warned of the risk of a system that could evolve into an “immense and tutelary power”, promising security, comfort and prosperity while gradually taking responsibility for more and more aspects of life.
“It would resemble paternal power if, like it, it had as a goal to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary it seeks only to fix them irrevocably in childhood,” he wrote.
“After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them …
“Habitually it is moderate, benevolent, regular and humane; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannise, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
As CS Lewis wrote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”

May be better to live under robber barons? But then CS Lewis was always a silly man, scribbling silly Xian fairy stories, full of moral busybody-ness and Xian triumphalism ...

The pond would rather have lived in the time of prohibition, and the attempts by omnipotent banners to take grog away from punters.

At least then you got Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, celebrating the joys of gay marriage.

And after a goodly time away from King Donald, trust the immortal Rowe to remind the pond of the madness that the reptiles have helped produce ...

Keep that sensa huma ...