Boring.
The reptile Jimbo jihad is getting exceptionally tedious ...
There was the canny Cranston rabbiting on yet again, briefly top of the digital world ma ...
The pond couldn't wait to click him into EXCLUSIVE intermittent archive oblivion ...
Fresh ideas, stat! Chalmers’ productivity policy SOS
The Treasurer has asked Treasury officials to develop new productivity policies for next month’s mid-year budget update as Australia’s productivity rate sits at -0.2 per cent.
By Matthew Cranston
Ditto the Jess jihad carried out this day by Johnno, moving from potholes to smoking ceremonies (damn you, difficult, uppity black people) ...
Truth, treaty and Victorian Labor’s ceremonial smoking of taxpayer money
A $14,000 sand circle, a $218,000 production bill and free tickets – how Victorian taxpayers were hit hard for a single night celebrating Labor’s Indigenous treaty.
By Damon Johnston
On the other hand, any excuse for a couple of Goldings...
Over on the extreme far right, heroic David was casting stones in aid of the rich ...
Australia’s peak business lobby has warned the government’s proposed discretionary trust tax contains three foundational flaws that threaten small business owners and economic growth.
By David Alexander
Just a note on the completely disinterested source (allegedly):
David Alexander is chief of policy and advocacy at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Further research for anyone who cares ...
...“No wonder some of the richest Australians are complaining about the new minimum 30% tax rate on discretionary trusts,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.
“For too long, many of the wealthiest Australians have used trusts to avoid paying their fair share.
“To say these changes are long overdue is an understatement. In his tax review way back in 2010, then-Treasury Secretary Ken Henry raised the alarm about trusts being used as a way to evade tax.
“The basis of a progressive tax system is those who have more, pay more – because they can afford to.
“When you close loopholes which enable rich people to pay less tax than low income earners you make the system fairer.
“You also raise more revenue to provide the services which benefit all Australians, like a good health system, schools, roads and supports for those living with disabilities.”
Or you can dwell in the Murdochian approved world of suffering billionaires... and speaking of tax and the rich paying their way, the pond had another question for the lizard Oz's caps-hating AI:
Guess that's what happens when your AI is restricted to the hive mind, and so can't catch up with the keen Keane in Crikey ...
In 2024-25, according to the Australian Tax Office’s corporate tax data released today, News Australia Holdings — the official name of News Corp’s Australian subsidiary — racked up 10 years of paying precisely zero tax. For that year, it earned $1.89 billion in revenue, made more than $300 million in profit (a record for the past decade) and paid nothing in tax.
Indeed, there’s a peculiar steadiness to News Corp’s tax dodging. For the past four years, it has earned around $1.8 billion in revenue and paid no tax on around $300 million in profits in 2023-24 and 2024-25, and $200 million in profits in 2021-22 and 2022-23.
You can go all the way back to when the first corporate tax transparency data was released for 2014-15 — the result of a Rudd-Gillard government initiative (opposed by the Coalition) — and find News Corp’s main company has paid no tax across those years, on revenue of, in total, $23.9 billion and profits of $1.38 billion.
The only News Corp entities to pay tax in that time were an investment company, which paid $200,000 (sic) in 2017-18 on $291 million in profits, and a pay TV financing arm, which paid $8 million in 2015-16. Real estate listing oligopolist REA Group, which News Corp part-owns, paid $246 million in tax.
Otherwise, News Corp’s only contributions to Australia are social division and the fostering of hate and resentment.
Speaking of divisions, the infallible Pope was on top of them...
Enough already, the pond should get down to its herpetology studies, and luckily Killer Kreighton was to hand, koping as best he could with the American disaster.
In klassic Killer form, he came up with a kolossal kaper, a JD whiz for the ages ...
"His natural and more polished successor"?
Relax, that's just Killer speak.
It's his way of window dressing the loser Vance, the cynical, humbugging, overweening, ambitious ratbag currently trying to put daylight between himself and the mad king...
“There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is,” Vance wrote. “But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. . . . The reason we lost is the war.”
To woo back the voters they lost, Vance argued, the administration would need to end the Iran war, refocus itself on cost-of-living issues, put America first, and “change our relationship to Israel.”
This would be extraordinary stuff from any vice president—let alone Trump’s, with his mobland obsession with personal loyalty. Vance has found plenty of ways this year to get the word out about his own reservations about the Iran war. But this is the first time he’s said fuck it and just started posting on main. And why not? What has he got to lose? Vance’s odds of winning the presidency in 2028 have never been lower, and even he must see that there’s certainly no path there anymore as Donald Trump’s Bestest Little Guy. Of course, it doesn’t seem very likely to work: There’s only so much you can do to distance yourself from a White House when you’re its second-in-command. And you can only bemoan so much about the need to end the war when you led the negotiations that failed to end it. (Andrew Egger in The Bulwark)
Say that line again ...
"...you can only bemoan so much about the need to end the war when you led the negotiations that failed to end it."
Music to the ear, but the couch molester has caught Killer's eye, as if somehow the taint of JD's craven, lickspittle toadying could be erased in a single blink ...
Now marvel at how Killer transforms an electoral disaster into describing Democrat positions as increasingly unpopular (has he ever been diagnosed as suffering from myopia?):
The pond was deeply touched by that snap of the mad King, waving a forlorn farewell and jetting off into the distance ... as if he'd do that before he got the chance to lead the first dance in his magnificent new ballroom...
So too did Walsh, who posted of the ballroom event, in which Trump seemed childishly gleeful watching beams being pulled by cranes: “This is far worse than I anticipated.” (Will Sommers, The Right's Election Meltdown Is Just Getting Started)
And he signed the beam "Love"!
Sweet joy, this is far better than the pond anticipated.
Killer kantered to a lame konclusion by celebrating the striking down of the right of women to control their bodies ... and the racist underpinnings of the Roberts court, with the Chief Justice himself devoting decades to the judicial art of punishing black people ... (see the reformed Toobin's Mapping Mississippi White in the NYRB (*intermittent archive link):
If that's what Killer thinks will save Trumpism and advance couch-molesting JD into the stumblebum doomed world of Gerald Ford, then hello bottoms ...
Truth to tell, the pond had waited with baited (giant bear trap size) breath to see if Our Homeric Henry would apply Thucydides to the US election fall out ...
Alas and alack, he decided to stay true to his Australian Daily Zionist News duties ...
That made the pond wonder how things were going with Benji ... and just maybe he might yet face his day in court, because such is the depth of the loathing, most unlikely bridges are forming ... per Haaretz ...
Both Arab-majority parties backed Eisenkot, while United Torah Judaism – traditionally aligned with Netanyahu and Likud – declined to endorse either candidate (*outside the paywall, but just in case)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received 46 recommendations, from Likud, Shas, Religious Zionism, Zehut and Otzma Yehudit. United Torah Judaism, traditionally aligned with Netanyahu's bloc, declined to recommend either candidate and said it was "not committed to any bloc."
Notably, all Arab-majority parties decided to recommend Eisenkot. The Arab-led Joint List joined Mansour Abbas' United Arab List in backing him, saying the decision was aimed at replacing Netanyahu's government.
Sorry for that brush with the now, the point to Our Homeric Henry is tedious journeys into the past to shore up his fatuous positions ...
At that point, the pond wondered if the hole in bucket man still wrote his copy with a quill dipped in ink, and delivered it to the lizard Oz bunker in Surry Hills by way of carrier pigeon, or did he "follow the science" and use a computer and the full to overflowing intertubes?
The only certainty is that the level of argumentation in that last paragraph was garbled to the point of meaningless gibberish, trotting out words such as "new credentialed elite" and "hegemonic in academia and our cultural institutions" as if they actually meant something ...
What was he proposing in relation to Covid? Follow the anti-vax ways of RFK Jr? Follow the mad King's advice to inject bleach? Swallow horse pills?
How would he assess the impact of climate change? By ignoring the science and resorting to a tea leaf reading with the Delphic Oracle?
He can just blather away the implications of stories such as Cryosphere faces permanent damage when world overshoots 1.5C, scientists warn?
Never mind ... there's yet more tosh and blather to wade through, we are in verbiage stepped in so far that, should we wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er:
Is it odd to hear a Zionist-inclined loon blather on about salvation and fanaticism?
No, it's more than odd.
To an atheist thanking god they're an atheist, it's deeply weird, and the final gobbet didn't sound like sanity might be returning soon ... as Our Henry patiently explained the rationale for Greater Israel, the colonial expansion of the state into Gaza and the West Bank ...
And yet, every so often, the worm turns, the disenfranchised get a break, and there's a break (however brief) from the persecution of the different and minorities...(though probably not to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, whatever happens to Benji) ...
And so to a bonus just because it was there ...(and also because it could be done in just two gobbets) ...
Dammit, it goes without saying that religious leaders shouldn't give the first toss about any so-called duty of care.
Their only care is to consign sinners to an eternity of hellfire ... you know, womyn wanting a say in their bodies, shellfish eaters, rogues wanting to mix fabrics, the sort of rule breakers that infest Leviticus ...
Religious leaders' fears over digital duty of care ...
If you can't berate teh gaze, and TG folk and such like, what's the point?
Next thing you know you won't even be able to prey away teh gaze ...
And what happens when sinners flood the intertubes with doubt, as the pond found via a link in Will Sommers' piece for The Bulwark..
Everyone with a podcast is feeling terrible, and they’re ready to fight about it!
Carry on clucking, Chooka ...
The pond took it all terribly seriously, and was deeply moved, so deeply that it felt compelled to look up this foul bird preaching for the sanctity of church-enforced orthodoxy ... (if somehow that rabble of competing voices could be prevented from denouncing each other as heretical sinners and splitters destined for an eternity of hellfire) ...
Waddya kno, this chook infests the pond's old stomping ground, the UNE ... reminding the pond once again how pleased it is never to have endured an Armidale winter and Oxford refugees for decades ...
Ah, he's a bloody useless Anglican.
Back in the pond's day, Opus Dei was all the go.
And with that done, time to wrap up proceedings with the immortal Rowe ...
The immortal Rowe really has captured the beast in his portrait. The pond realises it's wrong to tamper with art, but had an unseemly desire to zoom into CU to see the fine print ...
How is it not possible to gloat, in a very British and seemly way?
