Greetings from cocky land ...

 

One of the pleasures of the rustic life is the observation of cockies, a vastly different affair than the study of the reptiles of Oz.

They're a garrulous, raucous bird, with a communal streak ...

The pond fears that the communal streak might be the death of them, should the bird flu get amongst the hapless creatures, as they assiduously peck away at grass, which is better than when they're demolishing trees or eaves...

During the pond's time AWOL from herpetology studies, the pond has been doing - apart from bird observations - some reading.

Consider this: how many times has some idiot of the onion munching, or gormless reptile kind, referred to the West or to the dire state of Western Civilisation, or some other incoherent notion.

Incoherent, because without pinching assorted key inventions from China, or devouring the treasure of many other nations around the world, the "West" would have been a sorry place. Should it be called the "West with Chinese benefits"?

The pond brooded at the idea of featuring this review in the LRB the next time the onion muncher turned up, or perhaps some other reptile of the "Ned" or bromancer kind rabbited on about "Western Civilisaton" ...

Vol. 48 No. 17 · 24 September 2026
Ranks of Humanity
Thomas Meaney (* intermittent archive link)

The book under review ...

The West: The History of an Idea 

by Georgios Varouxakis.

Princeton, 491 pp., £35, September 2025, 978 0 691 17718 2

The pond thought a teaser trailer for the entire column could stand on its own, and that in future times correspondents might apply the term to any future reptile blather on the topic ...

Few terms​ in international politics appear so infirm, so doddering, yet so indomitable as ‘the West’. Attempts to replace it – ‘the developed world’, ‘the free world’, ‘the liberal international order’, ‘the global North’ – have only underscored its endurance. When Oswald Spengler leaped out of obscurity with the publication of the first volume of The Decline of the West in the last months of the First World War, he inaugurated a genre of premature autopsies: The End of the West; The Defeat of the West; The Abandonment of the West; The Death of the West; Suicide of the West. The books make up a small library, and the idea soldiers on, despite claims to the contrary. ‘The category “the West” does not seem to be in Donald Trump’s head,’ David Brooks wrote at the start of Trump’s second term. In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, Alexander Karp, the head of Palantir, writes that ‘the West’ is ‘a concept that has been discarded by many, almost casually’. One of the persistent features of the West is that its champions worry it will wither away.

While the historical West may have been constituted by Latin Europe and Britain, along with their colonial offshoots, many promoters of the West today seem to think of it as a club that can sign up new members, including eligible liberal democracies such as Taiwan, South Korea and what Solzhenitsyn once called a ‘Far West’, namely Japan. The most zealous booster of this sort is the historian Stephen Kotkin. But there is less porousness in the history of the West than this idealised picture suggests. The concept came into its own less as a geographical expression or a collection of values than as a euphemism for a particular cultural and political project. From the start, for its advocates, the West formed the vanguard of world development, but they were conflicted about how expansive or inclusive that development could be. The West can play at being universal, seeing itself as the only ‘civilisation’ and basing itself on metrics of modernisation or democratisation or simply wealth, but if the core appears threatened – by migration or the rise of a rival power or a sense of its own decline – it snaps back to its original, exclusive formation, as the superior civilisation among several. Various nations have claimed to be its leader – France, Britain, the United States – but the central drama of the West has been its diet: which nations it has chosen to keep out, and which it has swallowed whole.

The review spends much time contemplating what actually constitutes the "West" - Russia is a particular problem, what with it being both west and east - and there's a splendid origin story to go with it ...

One of the satisfactions of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea is that, with a precision far exceeding that of earlier accounts, it attempts to pinpoint the time and place ‘the West’ was born. Indeed he gives us the exact address: 17 rue Monsieur-le-Prince in Paris’s sixth arrondissement. In the 1840s, Auguste Comte began to concoct a plan for the ‘avant-garde of Humanity’ that would find political expression in a ‘République occidentale’. Comte was one of the first modernisation theorists. According to him, the advanced portion of humanity had moved through three historical stages: the ‘theological’, when it attributed historical causes to divine intervention; the ‘metaphysical’, when it graduated to thinking in abstract philosophical concepts; and then at last the ‘positive’ age, when industrial development and science were able to advance ‘order’ and ‘progress’, yielding a peaceful world society. Comte believed that the only part of mankind nearing this terminus was located in Western Europe, along with its transplanted societies in the Americas and Australasia. The ‘Western Republic’ comprised the French, the Spanish, the Italians and, more reluctantly for him, the English and the Germans. Greece and Poland were considered honorary additions as outposts of the West.

But there was a semantic hitch in Comte’s theory. As Varouxakis points out, the contemporary term typically used for Comte’s desired collection of peoples was ‘Europe’ or, less often, ‘Christendom’. Both these groupings, however, included Orthodox Russia, a pre-industrial despotism that in Comte’s view was far from prepared to join the ranks of the avant-garde of humanity. The other problem was that ‘Europe’ was too geographically restricted to include European settlers in the Americas and elsewhere. Comte needed a designation that could siphon off Latin Europe from Eastern Europe, but also include Britain and its colonial holdings in North and Latin America and Australasia. His solution was the coinage ‘Occidentalité’. Comte’s disciples in England at first translated the word as ‘Occidentalism’ (or simply ‘greatness’) before settling on ‘Westernness’.

It is easy to mock Comte’s notions. He wanted the world to speak Italian, and designed flags, wedding ceremonies and special uniforms for the apostles of humanity. His République occidentale – which Varouxakis translates as ‘the Western Republic’ – would have its headquarters in Paris (though Comte envisioned its moving to Istanbul), with delegations around the world sending emissaries to join their less advanced nations with the industrial age. Yet Comte was also an ardent anti-imperialist. He campaigned for French withdrawal from Algeria (its conquest had been led by his former student) and called for Britain to leave India, Gibraltar and the Caribbean. He was also an anti-nationalist, who insisted that all member countries of the Western Republic be broken up into smaller polities, each around the size of Tuscany.

It's easy to mock the onion muncher, and other reptiles of his ilk. They show the same kind of inanity and condescension that Comte showed when confronted with Russia ...

Shortly before his death in 1857, Comte wrote two letters to Tsar Nicholas outlining his plan for Russia’s gradual inclusion into the progressive vanguard of humanity. By virtue of its backwardness, Comte informed Nicholas, Russia had a unique chance to leapfrog the atomising parliamentary stage of Western Europe and integrate itself directly into the finished ranks of Humanity. (Comte envisioned a similar leapfrogging for Africans, who would be able to move directly from fetishism – the first sub-stage of the theological stage – to positivism, skipping the intermediary phases of development.) The peasant communes of Russia, and the general lack of national cohesion, made it suitable for a smoother breakdown into the smaller polities Comte favoured. His British followers, however, were explicit about constructing the idea of ‘the West’ in opposition to Russia. ‘What constitutes the West?’ Richard Congreve asked in 1866. ‘The elimination of Russia from the system is the first great rectification. She is an Eastern, not a Western power, or more Eastern than Western.’

And so it's gone ever since, stupid people deploying boxes and categories and rankings and inclusions and exclusions, and yet even the chroniclers of the madness fall victim to the disease, with - spoiler alert - this the last of the piece, with the most obvious quality of the "West" - the notion of "white", of "whiteness", whatever that means - only hinted at, but nakedly obvious when reading the onion muncher and his kind ...

...After a series of striking insights into the way ‘the West’ was constructed in opposition to Russia, Islam and communism, Varouxakis ends his book like another of the West-worriers he chronicles, warning us not to reject the idea of ‘the West’ if it means rejecting the ‘valuable principles and practices that came to be combined in what is called “the West”’. ‘The baby,’ he writes, ‘must not go out with the bathwater.’

One missing piece of Varouxakis’s puzzle is why ‘the West’ has been more successful than competing designations. It has to do with the term’s ability to elide contradiction. At once historical and geographically restricted, the West is also eternal and universal. It is limited to Western Europe, the United States and individual ‘Westerners’ around the globe, but all the while, as Kotkin sees it, the West is the horizon that all nations can reach if they play by its rules. This makes ‘the West’ a supple term of political art. When the going is good, the West is a limitless formation; when the going gets rough, the West cuts its losses, retreats into itself and publishes books about why it is the best.

The pond will likely reference this outing again, but for the moment will settle for a 'toon from the infallible Pope, noting the progress in a location neither east nor west, or both, but decidedly down under, unless you happen to flip the globe the right way up ...

The pond will shortly return to herpetological duties, even more agonisingly aware that there is so much that is more interesting to read than the lizard Oz when out and about in the world ...

Dorothy is unwell

 ... but hopefully back to normal soon.

Get out your pen and paper, it's larnin' time with the Caterist, Simpleton "AI" Simon, Geoff chambering a Pauline round, and the Major doing Major ...

Reasons not to vote Labor, part 3 ... in which Jason Clare goes full luddite ...

The header: By Nick Cater
Jason Clare demands return to pen and paper as school computer experiment backfires

The use of a bot voice while deploring computers: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption for the snap of demonic child-ruining machines: The Digital Education Revolution was one of Kevin Rudd’s keynote policies at the 2007 election when Education Minister Jason Clare was first elected to parliament. Picture: Alan Place

The plea for a place in the bot universe: Make us preferred on Google

This is precisely the sort of stuff the pond might expect from the beefy boofheads and his minions: a sudden revelation that computer literacy causes the decline and ruination of impressionable young minds.

Instead it's Jason Clare doing their work for them, and receiving the approval of the quarry-whispering Caterist...

Jason Clare wants to reverse the digital saturation of the classroom, reacquainting pupils with pen and paper.
“If you look in the average classroom today, you’ll see tablets and laptops on every desk,” the Education Minister told Seven Sunrise this month.
Clare’s aversion to computers in the classroom is surprising. 

Damn right it is, though anyone underestimating the capacity for Labor to pander to the lizard Oz hive mind has only themselves to blame for being surprised. 

The flood water-whispering Caterist seized on the back flip ludditism with delight ...

After all, Labor put them there in the first place. The Digital Education Revolution was one of Kevin Rudd’s keynote policies at the 2007 election when Clare was first elected to parliament as the member for Blaxland.
Rudd promised that under a Labor government no child in years 9-12 would be left in digital poverty. Each one of them would have a toolbox of the 21st century – a device known today as a computer – connected to the $4.7bn Information Superhighway, which became the $51bn National Broadband Network.
The evidence was clear, according to Labor’s policy document: “Students with better access to technology can receive a stronger education and achieve better academic performance.
“Computers at school should not be seen as recreational relief from studying, but instead as being crucial to helping students to learn.”
A loose citation attributing this pearl of wisdom to the OECD gave the proposal a veneer of authority.
Yet, like much progressive policy, Rudd relied on untested assumptions that had hardened into orthodoxy among the intelligentsia without any supporting evidence.
Today the received wisdom has turned full circle, as it frequently does when academic theory rubs its chin against gritty reality.

A snap of the Caterist-approved Clare ...Minister for Education Jason Clare. Picture: Jeremy Piper

“All of the evidence we’ve got,” Clare told viewers, “is that the more kids are using computers, the lower their results are.
“If you use a pen to write something down, you’re more likely to remember it than if you type it down.”

Well not all the evidence. 

The odd hint of ambivalence can be found: Pen and Paper Versus Laptop: Is There a Clear Winner in the Note-Taking Olympics?

Anyone who thinks you can reverse the trend towards digitisation and the full to overflowing intertubes is attempting a Canute ...

Personally the pond refuses to use phones and social media, but anybody who thinks that genie can be stuffed back in the bottle by a bit of banning simply hasn't studied the way that censorship usually fails in its mission. 

Except of course that banning is the go-to of conservatives of the Caterist class...and Jason Clare ...and what a chance to pile all-in on former chairman Rudd:

The theory that students needed one-to-one access to computers to prepare them for the so-called knowledge economy appeared plausible in the days before smartphones and social media colonised young lives.
Taxpayer-funded computers hit the policy sweet spot for Labor: middle-class welfare disguised as social justice. It was further embellished with the jargon of human capital, the rubbery argument progressives turn to when real economic logic runs out.
“The research and evidence show that the best way to boost productivity is to invest in human capital,” Rudd claimed in January 2007. “This is why education is the pathway to prosperity.”
If only Rudd’s assertion had been true, rather than an arbitrary proposition that sounds plausible in an address to the Education Research Unit at the University of Melbourne. Perhaps then the Rudd and Gillard governments might not have been the waste of time, space and money they turned out to be.
Rudd made good on his pre-election promise of a quantum leap in education spending, locking in a spending trajectory that successive Coalition governments would struggle to reverse. Real spending per pupil has risen by almost 50 per cent in the past two decades, from around $14,900 in 2003-04 to $22,185 in 2023-24.
In Rudd’s terms, we should now be reaping a healthy return on the hundreds of billions of dollars the government has invested in human capital over the past 20 years. Yet, as the OECD noted in its 2022 PISA results report, Australian students’ performance in mathematics, science and reading has steadily declined since the mid-2000s.

Inevitably there had to be a snap of former chairman Rudd: PM Kevin Rudd claimed in 2007 that the best way to boost productivity was to invest in human capital. Picture: Philip Norrish

The presence of former Chairman Rudd gave the Caterist a golden chance, and he took it, even as the reptiles at the lizard Oz tentatively embrace AI and seek to overcome the irrelevance their paywall produces ...

Ask a bot to generate insights from the Caterist? That's way too Beta for the pond ...

In 2007, Rudd cited “research” showing that if the average education level of the working-age population increased by one year, the economy’s growth rate would be 1 per cent higher. Yet the latest PISA results, released this month, show that average reading scores for 15-year-olds have continued their steady decline from 513 in 2006 to 491 in 2025. Mathematics scores have fallen even faster from 520 to 479. The overall picture is worse than it was in 2022, when the OECD delivered its damning assessment that 15-year-olds in 2022 scored at a level expected of 14-year-olds 20 years earlier.
On Rudd’s 2007 logic, a one-year slip in education levels would mean economic growth is 1 per cent lower. Setting aside the correlation-causation fallacy, omitted variables, and assumption of constant marginal returns inherent in such abstractions, the theory that falling education standards drive economies backwards has more than a ring of truth in our current circumstances.
Intangible investments in human capital, after all, do not turn out to be the most effective way to stimulate productivity. Business capital invested in plant, machinery and system efficiency is still the best way to increase the volume of goods and services and increase living standards.
The lesson from Labor’s fiscal adventures between 2007 and 2013 is to beware of hocus-pocus arguments that offer shortcuts to prosperity. The improvement in Australian living standards between the mid-1980s and late 2000s was the reward for the hard slog of economic reform. There is every reason to be sceptical of the Treasurer’s latest claim that AI will break the current productivity drought.
As Clare tacitly admits by committing to remove computers from the classroom, digital technology has so far failed to deliver the productivity dividends many hoped for. Indeed, productivity growth has declined steadily this century as the use, speed and sophistication of computers have increased. Somehow AI will be different, the Treasury wants to assure us, forecasting a steady 1.2 per cent annual rise in productivity until 2066.
Yet there is little hope that the stagnant productivity trend since Covid will reverse under the policy settings this government has put in place. On any reasonable expectation of future productivity, the promise of intergenerational improvements in living standards is about to be broken.
The greater tragedy, however, may be the educational impoverishment of future generations by the promiscuous adoption of educational fads like the digitisation of the classroom. Attempts to educate children in schools with libraries bereft of books, or worse, trying to teach kids remotely as we did during the Covid pandemic, proved to be a deeply dehumanising experience for kids and teachers alike.

And at the end the Caterist couldn't resist a rousing flourish ...

Rudd’s mistake was to conceive of education as an instrument of economic policy, forgetting that the highest reward of education is not material prosperity but a larger life: the capacity to read, reason, understand and delight in the accumulated inheritance of civilisation.
The real tragedy is not that we have made the next generation less productive. It is that we have made their world smaller.

If all the "capacity to read, reason, understand and delight in the accumulated inheritance of civilisation" results in the climate science denialism and routine stupidity of the Caterist, then we are truly doomed. That's not making the world smaller, that's destruction on a massive scale...

Meanwhile, the reptiles are haunted by AI, so as the cry is to haul digital out of schools, another cry comes about fear of missing out.

Take it away simpleton Simon ...

So while we de-digitise schools, we must do a lizard Oz, and go AI for fear of missing out? Seems so ...

To set up a refrain: so we de-digitise schools and at the same time, embrace "frontier model training" for fear of missing out or becoming a passenger? We must abandon computers in school, but at the same time seek relevance and leverage in the new AI world?

Ah, there's the solution. Arm students with pen and paper and we'll become the second centre for AI training in the Western world ...

Luckily kids in school will be fully armed with paper and pen, and ready to cope with the AI invasion, and theft of creative output, thanks to the Caterist and Jason ...

Meanwhile the reptiles continued their obsession with Gina's pampered pet ...

Back in the day, the pond would have sent such yarns to the intermittent archive, but these days, the pond must carry the burden alone, as it was left to Geoff to pump up the Pauline volume...

The more the reptiles talk up Pauline, the more they make it harder for the beefy boofhead, but you had to read deep into the stats to get there ...

It was only in the final gobbet that Geoff chambered a round aimed at the Canavan caravan, with the thought bubble that maybe the wheels might fall off in toad land ...

And there you have it. 

After all that blather about Labor came the line "If there's one leader who should be worried it is Matt Canavan".

Why wasn't that the lead? For that you'd need to arm yourself with paper and pen, and ask the lizard Oz's AI machine.

Now it's time for the ABC to take over, and regurgitate endless variations on the lizard Oz story, assuring everyone that Labor is doomed (and so, if the beefy boofhead and Pauline take over, is the ABC).

And so to the Major, relentless churner out of devoted Zionism for the Australian Daily Zionist News.

The pond hesitated as to whether to run the Major, what with Sharri - full disrespect - making an appearance, and Sydney University getting another bagging, and lordy, long absent lordy, is the pond beyond tired of this jihad ...

Express concern about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Syria? Not in Major land ...

And then as always happens, the Major went into full litany mode:

Usually the pond would turn to Haaretz for a story to balance the Major's rampant Zionism, and perhaps another story to balance the Major in deep north Pauline furriner bashing mode ...

The pond might also have wasted time noting the endless ability of the Major to show off his bigotry, what with his never ending DEI blather and ABC bashing, but the pond is tired, and decided it was better to let the Major show how stale and derivative he was, phoning it in from the golf links, and reverting to Killer Creighton for his insights...

And at the very end came a reminder of just how Emeritus Chairman Rupert had made this made man ...

2015?! And yet he still hangs around like a bad smell in a sinecure.

And what was it with that sentence, "Yet moving online will only accelerate", if anyone can dare to call it a sentence?

The reptiles would benefit from a lot more media scrutiny, but it's only when the stupidity is on view in another media organisation that they can dish it out ...

More than enough already, as another reptile does the Major's job, and so to the one cartoon for the day ... the infallible Pope's weekend outing...

You won't find that sort of story in the lizard Oz, but you will find it at SBS ...

Instead of a YouTube link, contemplate this, found at the Graudian ...

An ECU from the snap might help settle the nerves. Write 500 words on the world's prospects, using only paper and ink ...

Meet me in the crowd

People, people

Throw your love around

Love me, love me

Take it into town

Happy, happy

Put it in the ground

Where the flowers grow

Shiny happy people holding hands

Shiny happy people holding hands

Shiny happy people laughing

The Ughmann cracks the pond's extra-special bonus late arvo Sunday slot again ...

 

The pond almost gave up on including the Ughmann this week, but heard a forlorn cry in the distance, "won't someone think of the Ughmann?"

On second thoughts, that was likely delusional, the result of an overdose of the lizard Oz, which can be a bit like licking the skin of a poisonous toad - a brief high from the madness of it all, then terminal brain damage.

There will be no prizes for anyone guessing the topics outlined in this late arvo post. 

If nothing else, the Ughmann is supremely predictable ...

Okay, okay, the pond got lazy, and resorted to screen caps, but how else to cope with this sort of bog standard rant?

The pond realises that there might even be some correspondents more anxious to watch thugby leaguers play gladiator and give each other CTE than experience the degenerative condition from reading the Ughmann.

Giving Jimbo a stiff arm to the chops was just the beginning. (*"Stiff arm" is an ancient, Tamworth-approved form of play. Straighten arm, stiffen into cricket bat, swing wildly at opponent's head)

The Ughmann carried on with his litany, his Ginsbergian howl of pain ...

If you traced the Ughmann's pedigree back far enough you'd find a failed seminarian, but does that stop the Ughmann from carrying on like a pork chop?

That's purely a rhetorical question, a bit like wondering if an Ughmann story could ever be run without featuring dark Satanic windmills ...

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”
“What giants?” asked Sancho Panza.
“Those you see over there,” replied his master, “with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length.”
“Take care, sir,” cried Sancho. “Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, make energy and keep the lights on, except in the lizard Oz, where they prefer to live with the lights permanently off.”

The pond can't vouch that that's the precise wording in Cervantes' novel, and besides, it turned out that this time it was just a humble power plant of the old-fashioned kind.

Never mind, there was a cute little bot as the next snap, as cute as an AI button ...and relax, the Satanic windmills did come in for a slagging ...

As always, the Ughmann was dead keen on ways to destroy the planet ...

Even as the Ughmann decided we desperately needed to go full AI rogue, the reptiles featured another story about AI going rogue, for a moment top of the digital page ma ...

There's no need to bother with that reptile version. The both siderist NY Times will do, especially as the full text is on hand in the intermittent archive ...

Did any of that give the Ughmann a twinge, a moment of doubt, a pause for concern? 

Nah ...carry on Ughing ...

True enough. The planet's well on the way to a right royal stuffing, and the reptiles are busy helping prepare the stuffing ...

And the 'toons for this late arvo outing are ...

Polonius discovering the ABC is a conservative free zone? The dog botherer suffused with smugness? Dame Slap proud to be a mum? Garrulous Gemma impersonating a cheese grater? All the fun of the lizard Oz circus ...

 

The pond gets depressed at the monotonous regularity of the Australian Daily Zionist News portion of the lizard Oz, all the more so because prattling Polonius seems determined to become one of its main contributors.

What once was a regular Sunday lark in the park has now become a tedious chore ...

The header: By Gerard Henderson
Sydney University vice-chancellor Mark Scott has failed to fight antisemitism

The yearning for a bot reader: Listen to this article
6 min

The caption for the snap of a man looking downcast at the thought crime of having agitated Polonius: Mark Scott, vice-chancellor and president of the University of Sydney. Picture: NewsWire / Josie Hayden

The plaintive plea to ignore the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

The pond only went there because it allowed the pond to do its usual and detour to a Haaretz story ... but first a little of the moaning and whining, and a warning - full disrespect Sharri will make an appearance. 

The term failing upwards appears to have become something of a cliche of late. Even so, it is rare indeed that any successful and well-remunerated individual acknow­ledges that they have failed.
Enter Mark Scott, who earns more than $1m a year as the vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney. He is a former head of the NSW Department of Education, a former managing director and editor-in-chief of the ABC and a former director of John Fairfax Holdings Limited, sometimes referred to as Fairfax Media (but no longer with us).
It is a matter of record that antisemitism was rife on Australian university campuses after the Hamas terrorist attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, that led to Israel’s defensive war in Gaza. At some universities Jewish students were abused and intimidated, invariably by supporters of radical Islam and the radical left who set up encampments on university campuses. It’s a dangerous unity ticket.
The report of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, headed by Virginia Bell, will be handed down in late December. Its findings and recommendations are awaited with interest. But already Scott has acknowledged that he failed to address antisemitism on the campus he is paid to manage.
Appearing before a Senate inquiry on September 20, 2024, Coalition senator Sarah Henderson put it to Professor Scott (as he has become) that he had failed Jewish students and staff at the university. Scott replied: “Yes I have failed them and the university has failed them and that’s why we’ve made significant changes to our policy settings.”
It’s not clear what Scott meant by saying he had failed Jewish students and Sydney University had failed them as well. After all, he is the vice-chancellor and, as such, in charge of the university’s policies and practices. It might be expected that someone in a very senior position in a university who admitted to having failed with respect to the health and safety of staff and students would offer their resignation. Not Scott who, as reported on these pages on May 31, 2025, received a pay increase of $150,000. Just as well for the taxpayer-subsidised university that he did not regard himself succeeding in his role.
Scott used the F-word again when he appeared before the royal commission on July 15 this year. He also conceded, as he had at the Senate hearing, that he had negotiated the removal of the encampment with the Sydney University Muslim Students Association without consulting Jewish students or staff.

All this from a pompous pedant, done in a way that makes Polonius seem in the grip of an unhealthy jealousy, what with him seeming to have spent his career failing downwards.

Then came Sharri: News24 host Sharri Markson and Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin pictured at Bondi. Picture: Rohan Kelly

Okay, enough of that, it's time for the pond to detour off into a Haaretz story.

Herzog, Elor Azaria and NAZA: Today's Israel Openly Applauds War Crimes
President Herzog's pardoning of Elor Azaria is hardly a surprise to anyone who has been watching the Israeli public's response to extrajudicial and vigilante killings of Palestinians, which continue to be carried out and captured on film
Dahlia Scheindlin. (*intermittent archive link)

There's an idiomatic Hebrew phrase, "we've been in this film before" – close to the English expression "we've been here before," or we know what this situation means.
The phrase is the best way to capture the meaning of President Isaac Herzog's surprise pardon of Elor Azaria on the eve of Yom Kippur. Azaria was convicted of manslaughter in 2017 by an Israeli military court for executing a wounded Palestinian attacker point-blank, long after soldiers had shot and fully incapacitated the man.
It is particularly ironic to process this pardoning of a soldier who killed a wounded man in light of the sweeping fury in Israel over the film "NAZA." For two weeks, Israelis have emitted hellfire commentary, threatened unprecedented de-patriating and death against the filmmakers of the documentary that reveals alleged IDF war crimes in Gaza.
And yet when faced with another kind of film about what should have been viewed as a war crime, Israelis never even suggested that the incident was a lie, a fabrication or a blood libel, as per relentless accusations against "NAZA."
There was no denial at all of what Azaria had done – only a full-throated embrace that lasted not 25 minutes like the applause for "NAZA" at the Venice Film Festival, but 10 long years, a crescendo ending with the presidential pardon.

There's just time for a screen cap to show off the hero ...

Well you won't be reading any of that any time soon in the lizard Oz ...

Time to get back to Polonius and - dread thought - to Sharri ...

And he promised SUMSA the university would review its investment policies with respect to defence contracts, with Israel as the obvious target. At the royal commission, Scott said he now regretted this as well. In this regard he has become an apology expert.
Last Wednesday, Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin addressed The Sydney Institute on the occasion of the publication of their book Bondi Terror: The Tragedy, The Courage, The Aftermath (HarperCollins). Markson referred to the Globalise the Intifada group, which this week ran in the election for the Students Representative Council at Sydney University. The university’s administration clearly did nothing to prevent this. The decision had been criticised by the Chris Minns Labor government and the Kellie Sloane-led opposition in NSW.
I was in Israel during the time of the first intifada; it was a violent terrorist attack on Israeli society. The second intifada was even more violent. Markson made it clear that the term “globalise the intifada” was not a political expression and easily could be interpreted as a call to violence against Australians. She reported last Tuesday on her News24 Sharri program that she had drawn Scott’s attention to this. And that the university came back and said it was concerned and that everyone had a right to psychosocial safety – whatever that might mean. But nothing was done.
For his part, Ryvchin reported that the previous week at Sydney University, Jewish students who had obtained permission to operate a small stall to mark the Jewish New Year were relocated by campus security to a remote part of the campus for their protection. Why? In Ryvchin’s own words: “Globalise the Intifada activists were scheduled to be in the same area.” He added: “Again the peaceful were displaced to accommodate the violent.”

At this point the reptiles decided on a book promotion, and the pond decided only a screen cap would show off the naked positioning ... Bondi Terror: The tragedy, the courage, the aftermath by Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin

Okay, enough of that prose, glittering with preening smugness and condescension ...how about another chunk of that Haaretz story?

...Netanyahu, ever the weathervane, at first gave anodyne statements about the need to protect IDF values, but quickly shifted to open support for the soldier. On the day Azaria was convicted, Netanyahu announced his support for a pardon; perhaps not coincidentally, a poll by Channel 2 (today Channel 12) that same day found that two-thirds of Israelis supported such a pardon. By later that year, then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who had replaced Ya'alon, also asked then-President Reuven Rivlin for a pardon.
The military court had sentenced Azaria to 18 months in prison; then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot reduced it to 14 months, and in the end, he was released after just nine months in jail. To this day, he has expressed no regret for his actions, and the IDF therefore recommended as recently as July that he not be pardoned.
Israeli observers, such as Haaretz's Amira Hass, noted back in 2017 that it was only the film that put the incident on the public agenda. Numerous similar acts that were not filmed demonstrated a clear practice of shooting to kill any perpetrator, or even suspect – including before he or she perpetrated any act at all.
Netanyahu, ever the weathervane, at first gave anodyne statements about the need to protect IDF values, but quickly shifted to open support for the soldier. On the day Azaria was convicted, Netanyahu announced his support for a pardon; perhaps not coincidentally, a poll by Channel 2 (today Channel 12) that same day found that two-thirds of Israelis supported such a pardon. By later that year, then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who had replaced Ya'alon, also asked then-President Reuven Rivlin for a pardon.
The military court had sentenced Azaria to 18 months in prison; then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot reduced it to 14 months, and in the end, he was released after just nine months in jail. To this day, he has expressed no regret for his actions, and the IDF therefore recommended as recently as July that he not be pardoned.
Israeli observers, such as Haaretz's Amira Hass, noted back in 2017 that it was only the film that put the incident on the public agenda. Numerous similar acts that were not filmed demonstrated a clear practice of shooting to kill any perpetrator, or even suspect – including before he or she perpetrated any act at all.
In other words, being pardoned by the president of Israel is shocking but not surprising. Anyone who was nevertheless shocked that Herzog, a longtime politician from the Labor Party, was the one to do it has been quickly reminded over the last few days that it runs in the family.
In 1986, his father Chaim Herzog, Israel's sixth president, approved the unusual preemptive pardon for the Shin Bet agents who not only killed Palestinian bus hijackers after they were captured and bound, but who also participated in an elaborate cover-up in which the agents framed Israel's own military forces, lying shamelessly to their own investigating authorities.
Herzog pardoned them before they even stood trial – just as he pardoned or commuted sentences of Jewish civilian terrorists during his term, following their convictions. In the Bus 300 affair, the Supreme Court backed the preemptive pardons for the Shin Bet agents, such that they never even stood trial.
The current pardon of Elor Azaria is the latest evidence that Israeli society has long become not only inured but supportive of crimes against Palestinians. Two days ago, a Palestinian killed an Israeli settler on the eve of Yom Kippur at a West Bank spring. At his funeral, settler leader Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria regional council, called to "drain the entire swamp, not just to chase after the mosquito." The language about killing all the mosquitos has been used by Bezalel Smotrich at least as far back as 2018, when I first noticed it.
Dagan went on to advocate for a huge military operation against West Bank Palestinians. When that happens, we'll have more "NAZA" films about the collateral damage that looks very not unintended – and more indifference, accusations of lies or outright support.
I almost held back about "NAZA," since like most Israelis, I haven't seen it. For over a week, the fact that the film hasn't been released in Israel, even for private viewing by journalists, has grated on my sensibilities. Israel's response has been vicious, but it's also unfair that the public hasn't been given the chance to see it and react substantively.
Then I realized that we don't need a new and mysterious documentary to know how Israelis will react to films about the war crimes our country is committing. We've got plenty of such films already.

That distraction almost made Polonius's whining - a double coup for him, the ABC and Zionism - bearable... until the pond came upon those immortal words ...  ABC’s lack of viewpoint diversity, which made it a conservative-free zone ...

Read them in context and weep.

That old bumblebee is still buzzing around in the old Polonial noggin ...

At the ABC, the government appoints the board (except for the staff representative) and the board selects the managing director. I had discussions with Scott about the ABC’s lack of viewpoint diversity, which made it a conservative-free zone, before he took up the position and he seemed interested. Indeed, Scott suggested that he deliver his first speech as ABC managing director to The Sydney Institute. He did so in October 2006 and gave the impression that he wanted to reform the ABC.
But, alas, his reform drive did not last and he was soon caught up in the fashionable left culture that pervades the ABC and went into denial about its faults. When Scott left the ABC in 2016 it was in worse condition than when he arrived in so far as viewpoint diversity was concerned.
In short, Scott was too weak – read too nice – to reform the institution. And he keeps failing to ensure that Sydney University is a safe place for Jewish and non-Jewish Australians who support Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

As for the rights of Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese people? Go whistle Dixie ...or perhaps read the Haaretz email that regularly lands in the pond's in-tray ...

And so to the dog botherer doing a fairly standard lizard Oz hit job ...

The header: Albanese’s week in Manhattan said everything about Labor’s priorities
By Chris Kenny Associate Editor

The offer of a bot voice: Listen to this article

The caption for the snap which proposed that the dog botherer was a student of literature: A few hours in Manhattan and Anthony Albanese had gone all Bonfire of the Vanities on us.

The plea to ignore the paywall and go full logarithm: Make us preferred on Google

The comedy here is the dog botherer's blather about "smug". 

It's the sort of epithet he tosses out all the time.

Look up the dog botherer, and you can see him saying "Jim Chalmers seems to be incredibly smug" or saying "Bowen seems to smug about it", or Jimbo again, "as for the treasurer he remains smug", and so on and on.

It is of course projection.

He himself is incredibly smug, as he acknowledged in a reptile story back in 2017 ...

Perhaps I could assist the court, your honour?” Frankly, it was fun just hearing the words come out of my mouth. I had to suppress a smug smile that would betray how much fun I was having — this, after all, was serious. (sorry, the intermittent archive is still being spoofed by the reptiles)

Assorted images of the dog botherer ooze smugness.That slightly curled lip, that self-satisfied air of a made man ...

Is that a smug smirk, or a smirk trying to hide the smug?

And so "smug" is the angle du jour...

It is the smug indifference that gets me. It has been palpable from Anthony Albanese all the way from the banks of New York City’s East River, and back in Australia from Jim Chalmers as he published a report predicting four decades of budget deficits.
Confronted on Monday in the Big Apple with the shocking revelations from this newspaper about abuse and neglect of Indigenous children in Western Australia’s Pilbara, the Prime Minister was indignant. “Well, this is a Western Australian issue, and, you know, I will refer you once again to Malarndirri McCarthy, our minister in Australia,” said Albanese. “It is impossible to follow, on an hour-by-hour basis, what is happening in Australia from New York.”
A few hours in Manhattan and Albanese had gone all Bonfire of the Vanities on us. He was a “master of the universe” and should not be bothered about children back home.
Meanwhile in the Antipodes the Treasurer had released the latest intergenerational report, revealing the dismal reality that the federal budget is on track to remain in deficit over the next four decades – another 40 years or more of governments spending more than they raise. Yet in response to a media question Chalmers said “every page of this IGR in one way or another justifies, validates and I hope one day vindicates the difficult decisions that we’ve taken reforming the housing market and reforming the tax system.”
Even Donald Trump would struggle to summon the chutzpah of this pair. Indeed, this is the week that Albanese, who once said Trump “scared the shit” out of him because he tried to run politics through social media posts, sidled up to the US President for a selfie that he posted to social media.
Nothing undercuts criticism like imitation. Soon Albanese will trump Trump and start referring to AI as super-duper intelligence.

The reptiles slipped in an AV distraction featuring the distinctly short of intelligence Caleb ...

Next video thumbnail
Trump has decided to rename AI to ‘super intelligence’
News24 host Caleb Bond reacts to US President Donald Trump renaming AI “super intelligence” during his address at the United Nations General Assembly.

The dog botherer kept on pounding away ...

Back in Canberra, Chalmers was telling the little people he had big plans for them: “I want more Australians to be beneficiaries of change, and as the pace of that change picks up, so does the pace of our intergenerational obligations.” What a relief, I was worried this government was too busy saving the planet to deliver us into the vanguard of intergenerational prosperity.

See the smugness? Climate science is just a "save the planet" smug Superman joke.

You have to be incredibly smug to think that climate science is a laughing matter ...while others have seen the eternal Footman hold their coat and snicker, and in short were afraid.

If you're smug and self-satisfied - a crow eater way of life - you don't need fear.

When Albanese revealed an unprecedented AI hacking of federal government computer systems, he was asked for a message to concerned Australians and he refused to let this failure undercut his conceit: “The Australian government’s got your back.”
As the wise New York cabbie told Elaine Benes in Seinfeld: “Smugness is not a good quality.” Back in the day, Labor deployed the term aggressively against Peter Costello. In 2004 Labor frontbencher Stephen Smith said Costello was unpopular because of his “smugness” and “arrogance”. Whether or not that was fair, Costello was a treasurer with much to be smug about; Chalmers’ and Albanese’s smugness seems rooted in delusion. The cost-of-living crunch continues and is about to be made worse when the Reserve Bank board meets next week and is almost certain to continue its fight against “sticky” inflation by increasing interest rates again.
As David Koch wrote in an open letter to RBA governor Michele Bullock this week, a large part of the inflation problem is being generated by government spending (federal, state and local) but it is mortgage holders and small business owners who wear the pain.

And there's something insufferably smug and pretentious about giving Elaine her full name ...(why not Elaine Marie Benes if you want to sound even more silly?) ...Elaine Benes from Seinfeld always said ‘Smugness is not a good quality.’ Picture: Getty Images;Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ smugness seems rooted in delusion. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

 

Whatever it might be, that isn't a smug look on Jimbo's clock. The downward drop of the clenched shut mouth suggest he's just caught a whiff of the dog botherer in the neighbourhood. 

The pond threw in an extra snap as a compare and contrast, to show that it's the dog botherer that truly rooly knows how to do smug ...

As with all smug reptiles, at some point the whining always turns into a litany ...and if you expect to read "virtue signalling", scribbled by a smug pundit signalling his virtuous refusal to be a virtue signalling, you've come to the right place:

Electricity prices continue to move in the opposite direction to Labor’s promises as a direct result of its net-zero obsession and record immigration exacerbates a housing crisis that in turn has been made worse by the broken promises in Chalmers’ budget. Productivity is in retreat, government debt is at record levels, investors are looking elsewhere, we are experiencing deeper social unrest than we have seen in generations and have just experienced the worst terror attack in the nation’s history. Yet Albanese spent a full week away in the US, even though his Foreign Minister Penny Wong was there too. He accepted a “global citizen” award, embraced Volodymyr Zelensky, walked with Andy Burnham and hugged Emmanuel Macron like an old school buddy. It was an indulgent week, personally and politically.
Albanese went to the US early enough to be the main guest for the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, obviously an arrangement made long in advance with the ABC which conveniently focused on the AI issues the PM wanted to highlight. His meeting with Apple in California was a time filler and there was not a single meeting in New York that justified the trip – he was there to gladhand and announce his government’s bid for a UN Security Council seat.
Everything that makes the UN ineffectual and counter-productive – its virtue signalling, its bureaucracy, its penchant for words over action, its aspiration towards world governance, its refusal to distinguish between democracies and dictatorships, its chippiness about the US and its obsession with Israel as the root of all evil – is what Socialist Left politicians such as Albanese and Wong love about it. They revel in the bureaucrat-filled corridors and meaningless platitudes that smart politicians should abhor.

The reptiles provided another AV distraction, this one featuring admirable support for Ukraine over Vlad the sociopath:

Next video thumbnail
‘My friend’: Albanese and Zelensky sign security pact on UN sidelines
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have signed a new security agreement on the sidelines of the United Nations. The federal government is committing $60 million in military, energy, and humanitarian aid, taking Australia’s total support to almost $1.9 billion. Mr Albanese became visibly emotional when describing his admiration for Mr Zelensky’s leadership throughout the war against Russia.

Did any of that interfere with the dog botherer's insufferable inclination to smugness? Of course not.

He simply went about his business of preparing a litany of fodder to feed the chooks in the hive mind ...

Still, there they were, and they spoke as if they were engaged in the most important tasks in the world. And they deferred domestic annoyances to their colleagues back Down Under.
This betrayed a disdain for voters that most of the country would have picked up by osmosis. It was a lovely week for Albanese and Wong but a terrible one for Labor. There they were in New York, banging on about climate change, while Australians were paying more than $200 to fill their cars. Albanese’s Security Council push used the slogan “We listen. We partner. We protect.” It was an astounding boast after his government refused to listen to warnings about rising antisemitism and Islamist extremism for almost three years, failed to partner against it and failed to protect us from a terror attack at Bondi.
There for all to see on the PM’s Instagram feed was the self-fascination of the elites and their disconnection from the concerns of the mainstream. This behaviour has been the wind beneath the wings of surging conservative forces such as Reform UK, MAGA in the US, National Rally in France, Brothers of Italy and One Nation in Australia.
No doubt Albanese had the controlling hand in his lavish itinerary. But it might very well have been arranged by Pauline Hanson; she could hardly thank him enough. Angus Taylor, too, riffed off the Prime Minister’s black-tie self-gratification.
The whole week was so discordant politically that it makes me wonder whether Albanese did not care; that he might have already decided this would be his last UN visit, a final hoorah before retirement next year. Would he be smart enough to retire undefeated before the next election?
Albanese again met his Japanese counterpart Sanae Takaichi, keeping his hands rigidly by his side with no overt apology for his cretinous melons insult. And he stayed so long in New York that he will not be back in time for the AFL grand final – surely another tactical move because after publicly sharing his fantasies about Kylie Minogue, shots of him ogling the pre-game entertainment would have been toxic. Still, footy or no footy, voters are left with an array of images of Albanese spinning around the UN this week, oblivious to the challenges at home. Labor will be worried these are the observations voters can’t get out of their heads.

Okay, the pond has done the Zionist News and done the usual reptile rant, what else?

The pond should at least note in passing that the reptiles have been spending an enormous amount of time giving the Plymouth Brethren a voice?

Why? Well game recognises game, cult recognises cult ...

And out of sheer perversity the pond decided to recognise at least a portion of Dame Slap, in incredibly defensive mood.

She says she's proud to be a mum, but there's such a thing as protesting too much ...

The pond could take only so much of this, and decided to cut back on the Dame, with this - spoiler alert - the final gobbet ...

Whatever, the pond will take almost anything other than whatever the MAGA cap-donning Dame Slap is having. There seems to be a resentful chip on shoulder lurking: mentions of "mum/s" 8; mentions of "dad/s" 0.

Finally the pond was faced with a choice. 

Do grating, garrulous Gemma, or do the Ughmann.

The pond decided that the Ughmann was too long - a full six gobbets deep - and the pond was already running overlong (damn you intermittent archive, get your act together).

So the pond booted the Ughmann to a Sunday 4 pm slot for specialists in Ugh, with garrulous Gemma needing only three screen caps ... and the first bit was just a repeat of an Albo excerpt, which the screen cap reduced to "lives", and even that was more than was needed ...

The pond wondered if it was necessary to give space to galling Gemma, grinding away, but found a reason.

The pond frequently rabbits on about the "hive mind", like that excruciating Exorcist II movie (now with splendid documentary 'making of'), and Gemma was proof that it wasn't as airy fairy a concept as the fairies at the bottom of the garden that sent Conan Doyle into a frenzy.

There really is a lizard Oz hive mind, a murmuration of reptiles.

See how the grating one cobbles together both Polonius and the dog botherer.

Been there before? Do it again ...

Sound familiar? 

Unfortunately the pond has already done its "compare and contrast" Haaretz story, and has done Polonius on Mark Scott, and so quickly moved on to the next and final gobbet ...

Reading this kind of incessant, inane repetition of reptile thought bubbles can send a sensitive reader insane, but luckily the pond spent years working out how to cope with mendacious propaganda of the 2D kind.

And the 'toons for this outing are ...

And so to yet another attempt to cope with the madness ...