Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts ...

 

The pond always tries for inclusivity and diversity, but a second attempt to wade through "Ned" was just too onerous.

Spoiler alert, if you managed to make it to the bitter end, you discovered another reptile attempting to distance himself from his American kissing cousins ...

...“The consequences of failing to do a deal should not be understated. Realistically, it will be at least five, more likely 10 years, before Europe opens the door to Australia again. In the meantime, competitor exporters in Canada, New Zealand, India and Mercosur (South America) will exploit their advantage.
“The sticking point is the deal’s current concessions in relation to labour standards and climate change. On one reading, these provisions reflect our existing obligations under adopted ILO rules and the Paris Agreement – the latter signed by Tony Abbott, ratified by Malcolm Turnbull and written into our own free-trade agreement with Britain by Scott Morrison.
“On another reading, they are a problematic intrusion into a future government’s ability to regulate industrial relations and decarbonisation. It is these provisions which will be highly scrutinised by the Coalition through JSCOT to ensure future governments can make and change policies in the nation’s economic interest.”
The Greens have trailed their coat on the deal. Their trade spokeswomen, Sarah Hanson-Young, has said the deal could help workers and the environment. “I have had constructive talks with Minister Farrell and will continue to engage constructively,” she said. If the Greens decide the climate and environmental provisions are meaningful, they might be tempted, but that would be a leap.
One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce has been circumspect, saying the Nationals have been too fast to oppose the deal and has suggested its benefits need to be assessed. One question: is Gina Rinehart a likely winner from the FTA?
Finally, there should be no mood in this country for the childish anti-European prejudices of JD Vance when many European nations are increasing their defence budgets. Urgent responses are under way in a number of Eastern European nations against tangible threats from Russia – responses far more serious than anything Australia is doing. The idea we don’t need closer institutional economic and strategic co-operation with individual European nations as well as the EU is absurd.

That's as much as the pond could manage. 

The full 15 minute bot read marathon is at the internet archive (in dodgy layout), The Coalition veto on Labor’s free-trade agreement with EU.

The reptiles might like to pretend they had nothing to do with Faux Noise's gift to the world ... but Faux Noise is still trying to herd the faithful MAGA to vote for the GOP, so the mad King can carry on in his patented, verging on the demented, definitely unhinged way ...

And so to an equally onerous burden, Polonius prattling on about the Haines tragedy. 

Here you have to remember that the crocodile tears and the faux sympathy conceals past attitudes, as seen in the Jess Malcom and Joe Kelly offering Pro-ALP record sparks warning on ‘fake independents’ Helen Haines, Zali Steggall and Rebekha Sharkie.

Back in April 2022 the reptiles toed the Josh line ...

New analysis shows crossbench MPs Helen Haines, Zali Steggall and Rebekha Sharkie have voted with Labor on two out of every three divisions in the 46th parliament, with the Morrison government using the data to warn Australians against supporting “fake independents”.
Ms Haines voted with Labor 67.92 per cent of the time, Ms Sharkie 64.64 per cent and Ms Steggall 66.04 per cent, according to research from the Parliamentary Library.
All three independents hold former Coalition seats – Indi in rural Victoria by 1.39 per cent, Warringah on Sydney’s northern beaches by 7.2 per cent and Mayo in the Adelaide Hills by 5.1 per cent respectively...
...Mr Frydenberg on Wednesday called out the failure of ­independent candidates to nominate who they would support in a minority government despite campaigning for transparency and accountability in politics.
“Independents are fake independents,” the Treasurer said. “They are being run and organised and are acting as a political party. Their strings are being pulled elsewhere by Climate 200. They’re running on a Labor Party ­platform.”

Of course the reptiles would argue it was just vigorous discourse, a healthy but polite disagreement, as they went about the business of demonising independents as Labor party stooges, daring to back "the Palestinian agenda", or faux greenies, rabid climate science believers, and some kind of dangerous radicalisation of the body politic.

Naturally they've now seized on the behaviour of a clearly sick puppy to make political capital from a tragic assault on an MP, and naturally Polonius seized the chance to slip in his own politicising of the matter.

Yesterday the pond noted the absurdity of the lizard Oz headline offered to Polonius...

Alleged attack on MP Helen Haines highlights rising extremism risks across Australia

Alleged attack? No, the attack was real, but it could be alleged that the vicious assault was done by a deeply disturbed loon.

The pond did appreciate the sentiment in the header for the splash ...

Say that again? Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts

Keep it in mind for the rest of this post.

Could Polonius stick to that promise? 

Of course he couldn't. What followed was a performative both-siderist tract, followed by a politicising of the attack ...

If Calwell's attempted assassination by Peter Kocan wasn't political, then much the same could be said about the current matter, allowing the caveat, until we know all the facts

But in typical style, Polonius broke into full politicisation, regardless of the facts ...

Did everyone notice?

The most significant acts of political violence in modern Australia's history have been instigated by the extreme left.

To rephrase, the memory hole as far as right wing journalists explains how the Polonial memory hole swallowed Captain Francis de Groot, and all the other far right ratbags who've briefly taken centre stage over the years.

And in the next gobbet Polonius whittered on in the same way ...

Australia remains a relatively peaceful place. Yet there is reason to be concerned about the developing axis between religiously motivated radical Islam and the secular radical left.
So far this combination has been restricted in Australia. But recent developments in France and some other Western European nations demonstrate the potential problem.
This is not the first time the radical left has been a danger to freedom in Australia. 

Remember the injunction? Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts ...

Forget it Jake, it's Sydney Institute syndrome ...

So glad to see: Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts

Now let's drag 'Nam into it ...

Stop right there. There was a link attached, and it led here ...

Commentary
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Anger is no longer a political by-product. It’s the business model

Well yes, the Murdochians have long made anger, fear, hate, division, and loathing their business model, but expecting them to admit it is a bit like expecting navel gazing would produce some kind of introspection. 

Imagining it's all the work of social media is to miss the way that social media finds its sources in the mainstream media - in much the same way as the ABC seems to find many of its stories and attitudes revealed to it by the lizard Oz.

But the pond digresses ...the real point is this ...

Polonius has always had a war monger bee in his bonnet when it comes to 'Nam ...so naturally he was tut-tutting and clutching his pearls ...

The demonstrations in the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s against the Australian commitment to the Vietnam War were frequently violent. For example, it was all but impossible for members of the Coalition government to enter some university campuses at the time. And there were violent street demonstrations aimed at police.

Who wouldn't take to the streets to protest this complacent drivel?

And there's the real rub. 

Polonius was always a war hawk and a war monger, a man who believed that the Vietnam War was worth fighting and dying for (just not him, it's much better to wage the war in print than be a mug punter rustic conscripted to head off to the front lines).

There was some pushback to that piece ...

In April 2015, on the fiftieth anniversary of prime minister Robert Menzies’s decision to commit Australian combat forces to South Vietnam, political commentator and columnist Gerard Henderson wrote that it was a “correct decision taken in the interests of Australia.” He argued that the 521 Australian soldiers who died there “did not die in vain” because that ten-year war gave Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand time to equip themselves to handle the communist victory in Vietnam in 1975 much more effectively than would have been possible in 1965.
This is a big call, particularly given the fact that, of the 521 Australians who died, 185 were conscripts; surely this must be of some moral relevance to any judgement about the outcome. And it is impossible to judge the “correctness” of the Vietnam war without considering those who came back injured and damaged, unable to lead a functioning life again.

Off to fight in a mindless, meaningless war, all because your marble came up, and Ming the Merciless and Polonius deemed it so and fitting. Moral relevance? Not a reptile concept ...

The Vietnam war is perhaps the best example of extreme far right violence inflicted on hapless conscripted boys in the last hundred years, not that we're the only ones featuring lap dogs of war ...

And then things went completely down hill, because all the reptiles were busy politicising the Haines assault, with the Ughmann joining the conga line ...

Remember that refrain? Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts 

The reptiles, accustomed to fear, hate mongering and incessant jihads about grievances, simply couldn't follow that simple injunction ...

Day after day, the reptiles respond to any dissident or disrespectful minority or pesky furriner in a fast, disrespectful and intolerant way, yet none are so blind as those that refuse to gaze at their own navels ...

Now it's beyond time to invoke that mystical entity, "The West"...

Yet more of the attitudes embedded in the Australian Daily Zionist News, but who or what is "The West"?

That obsession with bums is deeply weird, for a party always ready to indulge in homophobia, but perhaps that's the new version of "The West".

Now it's time to do a a mini history of political violence, so that ultimately "the left", marching through the institutions, can be labelled the worst offenders (why did all the reptiles leave out the Battle of Broken Hill and the Battle of Brisbane?)

Now for a little both siderism, but please remember the ultimate aim of the mission, of point of the jihad, the relentless politicising of the attack ...

Time now to pin the blame on the left-wing donkey, apparently a strategy approved by all who live inside the lizard Oz hive mind ...

Ah, the old conga line, a favourite routine when it comes to verbal violence, and yet when the pond looks around, much of the current violence in the world seems to have a far right dictatorial hue ...

But apparently it's the left the pond should fear, not the whole pack of rabid reptiles ...

Mobilise? 

When the reptiles give up their climate science denialism, their relentless scapegoating of TG folk, furriners and the like, and their daily litany of online rage - the only saving grace the paywall that means you have to pay to be radicalised - then the pond will take seriously this sort of sanctimonious and righteous bleating...

The first step?

Perhaps we should nationalise the Murdochian press ... or face more decades of a circular firing squad, as each day they all line up to announce that, one way or another, they've had a gutful ...

Speaking of having a gutful, the pond always strives to be comprehensive, which means at least noting the dog botherer, also sublimely unaware of the ostensible Polonial mission ... let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts

Did anyone think the dog botherer could follow that call?

A more interesting question is what happens when a hate and fear monger accuses others of hate mongering? What happens when anyone suggests civility?

Damn it, there'll be no civility here, there'll just be a bog standard dog botherer pile on, seizing every chance to politicise the attack ... Hatemongering PM has a nerve to call for civility.

Here no civility, no politeness, no thoughtfulness or graciousness, just the snarling and the exposed gnashing teeth of a slavering hound, down there with that Baskervilles beast ...

At this point, the pond broke.

It was the sight of Sharri, full disrespect, that did the pond's head in.

When the reptiles pause to consider the female Teals and independents, it's only so that their dirt unit can lump them together as a disgrace, a pox on the country.

Remember these sorts of wars?

Teal-linked body hits back at Liberal Party’s fresh attack on community independents

...A new website, called Teals Revealed, which has been authorised by the Liberal Party, claims that a communications company employed by several independent candidates has “deep links to the Labor Party and GetUp”...

...The attack website also attempts to tie independent crossbenchers to the Greens based on shared voting patterns in Parliament.

It mirrors the attack line trotted out by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and conservative lobbyist group Advance in recent months.

“Australians certainly can’t afford three years of a Labor minority government, one in which the green Teals or the extreme Greens hold the balance of power,” Dutton said at a Liberal Party state conference earlier in the month...

...The Australian reported that the website will be backed up by advertising on social media, traditional media and letter drops...

...The Liberal Party – among other dubious accusations levelled at independents – claimed that their success would unleash chaos upon the Australian Parliament.

Now butter wouldn't melt in their Teal and indie bashing mouths?

It was too much, and the pond decided that a top and tailing of the dog botherer would be more than enough. 

Genuine masochists could suffer the full experience via the intermittent archive link above.

Truly there was nothing new to see ... because, don't ya kno, it's all the fault of the left, and yet weirdly, the reptiles decided to slip in an example of "Juliar, ditch the witch", with the dog botherer defending the mad monk, because whipping out a chaff bag and dropping Gillard far out to sea is just normal political discourse in the hive mind.

It's beyond the valley of the insufferable, as the dog botherer ended in full "litany of grievances" mode ...

We're so far from Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts that we're deep in another country, a hive mind where any connection to reality is tenuous, but where jihadists and crusaders will use any event to reinforce their world view, will use an assault to conduct assaults on their enemies, to wage wars, jihads and crusades...

Never mind the tragedy, seize the chance to turn it into a baseball bat to bludgeon anyone with a slightly different view of the universe ...

Speaking of world views, why not a riff on The Simpsons, kompleat with a different kind of Krusty Klown ...

Yet another reminder of what News Corp has given unto the world ... though to be fair, it's not just Faux Noise ...

And now to conclude with a summary of the past week of madness ...

But is there hope? Be still, beating heart ...

Many reading assignments for diligent herpetology students, but the pond is still searching for intestinal fortitude ...

 

The pond is still ginger about its return to the ranks of reptile observers, and found it hard to pay attention to the jihads that pass as "news" at the top of the weekend digital edition:

Spend precious time doing the "Ned" Everest climb, with the beefy boofhead and Ted "nuke the country" O'Brien as his companions?

EXCLUSIVE
‘Dud’ deal: Taylor rebuffs Labor over EU trade deal
‘Dud’ EU trade deal: Libs rebuff ALP but offer olive branch
Australia’s third-largest trade partner deal is in jeopardy after the Opposition Leader called the EU free trade agreement a ‘dud’, but the Coalition has offered an olive branch.
By Paul Kelly

Even worse, "Ned" doubled down ...and that required a full 15 mins of "bot" listening to wade through

The Coalition veto on Labor’s free-trade agreement with EU
There should be no mood in this country for the childish, anti-European prejudices of JD Vance.
By Paul Kelly

Hardier souls can don their Everest Millets and head off to the internet archive for their fix. 

Maybe the pond will summon the strength for the climb on the morrow, or maybe the likes of the Ughmann will offer a distraction ...

The pond also struggled to pay attention to a recalcitrant toad from the deep north, suddenly aware of the implications of all the inane bigotry doing the Murdochian rounds...

After years of fear-mongering and bashing furriners, with Dame Groan offering weekly rants about how we'd all be rooned by the invading hordes, suddenly the reptiles have come to this?

EXCLUSIVE
‘Diabolical’: Crisafulli urges rethink on blanket migration cuts
Queensland Premier David Crisafulli breaks ranks to slam Canberra’s ‘crazy’ migration debate
The conservative Queensland Premier, whose political survival depends on regional seats, has declared blanket migration cuts would be ‘devastating’ to the economy.
By Marcus de Blonk Smith

The temptation to plonk on de Blonk was easily resisted and once again the archive relieved the pond of the burden...

And as for that boiling Rice, raging at the trans clouds? Fergeddit ...

EXCLUSIVE
Pro-trans lobby’s campus capture revealed
Degree of capture: how transgender lobby grades universities
Newly obtained FOI documents reveal how trans lobby group ACON has shaped university courses, targeted dissenting academics and ensured career advancement for ‘allies’.
By Stephen Rice

So much reptile fuss and lathering about an already persecuted minority ...conscripted to serve as this millennium's Salem witches...

If the pond might pause to do an Our Henry, what about the strange case of Tiresias?

...On Mount Cyllene in the Peloponnese,Tiresias came upon a pair of copulating snakes and hit them with his stick, upon which he was transformed into a woman. Afterwards, as told by Phlegon, god of prophecy Apollo informed Tiresias: if she spots copulating snakes and similarly harms them, she will return to her previous form. After seven years as a woman, Tiresias found mating snakes; depending on the myth, she either made sure to leave the snakes alone this time, or, according to Hyginus and Phlegon, trampled them. In both outcomes, Tiresias was released from the sentence and changed back to a man.
According to Eustathius, Tiresias was originally a woman who promised Apollo her favours in exchange for musical lessons, only to reject him afterwards. She was turned by Apollo into a man, then again a woman under unclear circumstances, then a man by the offended Hera, then into a woman by Zeus. She became a man once again after an encounter with the Muses, until finally Aphrodite turned him into a woman again and then into a mouse.

Make of that what you will, but by golly, sex changes were pretty easy in ancient times ...(not to mention the joys of being a rodenta furry).

And the pond has absolutely no idea who would be interested in this sort of gushing by Louise ...

How men and women fell out of love – and created a culture war
Single life is leading to a political radicalisation of the sexes. Is marriage the antidote?
By Louise Perry
Columnist

Sorry Louise reading the lizard Oz is the guaranteed path to political radicalisation. Better life as a hermit in a cave than that ...

Even worse, Geoff was chambering his usual rounds, and carrying on familiar jihads ...

EXCLUSIVE
Grayndler’s had a gutful: PM’s own voters rebel
New polling shows Anthony Albanese’s primary vote has collapsed by almost 14 per cent in his own Grayndler seat, with a left-wing independent now posing a credible challenge.
By Geoff Chambers

No seats safe for the major parties
No sitting federal MP from a major party should feel safe in their seat.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

What a tiresome, tedious, repetitive reptile hack he is ...but after that careful winnowing and wilful handing out of reading assignments, not much was left, and the remnants had the smell of stinking offal ...

Yes, the bromancer went there, and the pond was reminded again of that infallible Pope cartoon ...

Is there a connection between bromancer stupidity and inanity ... and the French riots?

Possibly not - who knows? - and that's the art of the bromancer. 

Raise nonsensical connections, phrase it as question - always be asking questions - then leap into the rhetorical void...

This is a man who routinely deploys intemperate language in pursuit of his ideological obsessions, labelling dissidents as "nuts", and "insane", and so on and so forth ...

How did the pond end up so quickly back in the Australian Daily Zionist News, with another column intent on ignoring the ethnic cleansing currently going down in the West Bank, Gaza and southern Lebanon?

How stupid does the bromancer manage to sound? Take this line at the start of the next gobbet ...

The word Zionist means anyone who supports the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East; in other words, anyone who supports the existence of Israel. 

You could just as easily argue that in later times, "Zionism" has become synonymous with a particularly virulent form of theocratic rule, and exclusionary government, with ethnic cleansing tendencies and a wanton enthusiasm for the revival of a form of apartheid...

Alternatively, the pond prefers the notion that the term came from a form of wild cats...

...yet another possibility is that Zion is derived from that same “on” suffix, but that the beginning of the name comes from a name of an animal, which once lived there, and which the Bible calls (in the plural) tsi’im. We don’t know what this animal is but some speculate these were wild cats. It seems that we will never know for sure. (Haaretz)

Too light a tone for an ongoing genocide? 

Why not just further simple mindedness?

What a relief that portion of the rant returned to the perfidious French, as if rioting hasn't been a way of life since the eighteenth century ...

The pond passed over the bromancer's sudden turning on mad King Donald, as if the Murdochians had done nothing, via Faux Noise, to spread the poison, as if Dame Slap had never donned a MAGA cap and gone out into the streets of New York at night to celebrate the new era of poison and bile ...

At this point in any reptile rant, there has to be a bunny, and as usual it was the greenies.

Come on down greenies, feel the bromancer bile, taste the insults, hearken unto the verbal violence ...

The pond isn't much interested in the bromancer's student days, aligned with the mad monk and his mentor BA Santamaria's devotion to Franco, and the pond has its own problems with the Greens, what with their recent disavowal of Ukraine ...

But to rabbit on about them in this kind of feral,violence, savage, insulting way?

It's really a form of deflection. 

The damage being green has done to the planet is minuscule up agains the depredations of mad King Donald and his minions, urged on by News Corp in its various manifestations - from random murders in the street to rampant looting of the state purse.

And when it comes to Ukraine, has any greenie done the damage of fascist leaning, white nationalist devotee Uncle Leon?

As a side note, the pond found this suggestion by Paul Krugman irresistible ... It’s Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk, Americans did not give him the right to make national security policy

Of course it will never happen, but what a nice idea ...

What greenie has done damage to the international order in the way that Elon and mad King Donald have done?

Pace Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic ... What the U.S. Is Really Doing in Venezuela

Suppressing democracy and extracting resources at the expense of its people

...The political and business relationship now being forged between America and Venezuela is completely different. It’s not a relationship of two equals, obviously. But nor is it exactly an occupation. Some have compared it to the Anglo-Persian oil deal of the early 20th century, or the 1905 treaty that gave the U.S. government control over the customs service of the Dominican Republic, but neither of those analogies is quite apt. Searching for a model or a reference point, I asked Hausmann how he would describe it. “A coalition of two kleptocracies,” he said.

And again ...

...At the end of the day I spent floating through the postapocalyptic landscape of Lake Maracaibo, I met Juan Pablo Guanipa, one of the best-known opposition leaders in Venezuela. Guanipa, who lives in Maracaibo, was released in February after eight months in prison. He was detained on the street the next day, placed under house arrest, and then released again. He is still followed by the Venezuelan security service wherever he goes. Sitting in a room filled with books, we talked about the oil deal, the poor economy, the rising frustrations of Venezuelans.

I asked him whether he found the new union between Americans and Chavistas peculiar. Of course he did, he told me. Most perplexing to him, it seemed, was the absence of Yankee pragmatism, the most basic thing Venezuelans expected of Americans. At the very least, American capitalists should know about the rule of law. “I never thought we would reach a moment when we would have to convince the United States of the obvious—that Venezuela needs a legitimate government, that we need elections, and that we need change.”

And what about the violence done to the English language by Witkoff?

Vladimir Putin, the Humanitarian

Please update your dictionaries accordingly.

By Alexandra Petri

“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.”

— Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, addressing Russian President Vladimir Putin

Mark Wednesday, October 21, 2026, as “the day words lost all meaning.” My dictionary just ran outside and threw itself off a bridge. Noah Webster arose from his grave and lurched around, howling and tearing at his hair. Samuel Johnson is bellowing something awful; I can hear it across the Atlantic Ocean. George Orwell is sighing; he has been here before.

I have to imagine that Putin is a little insulted at being so gravely misunderstood. With this single word, humanitarian, our envoy has revealed a stunning ignorance of the Russian president’s life’s work. This is like going to Picasso and praising him as a “representational painter,” or calling the Sahara “the wettest place in the world,” or describing Witkoff’s statement as “unembarrassing.”

I see, perhaps, where the misunderstanding began. Putin referred to Trump as a “humanitarian,” and Witkoff thought to himself: Ah! This word clearly has a different meaning than I have been led to believe! I will have to reconstruct its definition from context clues. Maybe it’s someone with P in his name. Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t think that the United States should be in NATO. Maybe it’s someone who would look really good on horseback. Maybe no words mean anything! Maybe they are just phonemes to be thrown at a wall, at random, in the manner of that great representational painter Jackson Pollock.

One of the conditions of freedom is that words have an understood meaning. If Putin is a humanitarian, then Dolly Parton was an axe murderer. Who else gets to be filed under humanitarian if Putin makes the cut? Stalin? The iceberg that sunk the Titanic? Calling Putin a humanitarian is like calling Hannibal Lecter a humanitarian, although there is more of a case to be made for Hannibal because he does, at least, subsist on people...

Priorities bromancer, priorities! 

Why this ranting at greenies, when there's a world of shame emanating from tax-avoiding News Corp?

Talk about the need to pay a price for all the ugly extremism that Faux Noise has unleashed on the world ...at the minimum, a little tax from a foreign corporation looting the country ...

No doubt the likes of Hannity and Ingraham are rolling around on the floor, convulsed by laughter.

Is there any further irony to be found?

Well the Polonial prattle this weekend began with a header implying a rebuke to the bromancer ...

Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts

The traumatic injuries suffered by Helen Haines prompts fresh scrutiny of political violence in Australia.

By Gerard Henderson

News24 Columnist

The pond's enthusiasm for the notion of not politicising the matter was tempered by the alternative reptile header for the piece:

Alleged attack on MP Helen Haines highlights rising extremism risks across Australia

It's an "alleged attack"?!

The pond didn't have the strength, and will save Polonius, News24 columnist, somehow lost in the hive mind of the lizard Oz, for the morrow ...

Even so, the point stands. 

Confronted by Ted Kacznski back in the day, the pond has no doubt that the bromancer would have rushed in to print to denounce his Unabomber ways as a greenie lust for violence designed to bring about the end of the state of Israel, as a mentally ill man with extreme political motivations, and none of them to do with the bromancer's favourite causes (and what about the violence of enduring a performance by Rusty? Say no more.)

And so to catch up on a surfeit of 'toons ...

The real problem? Delusional religion.

You can see it in the stupidity of the fundamentalist tyke thinking of the bromancer ...shouting at the clouds about extremism, in a way that could only be called irrational, and extremist ...

A toe in the water with a Heroic Homeric Our Henry outing? Sorry, no can do, but there's bigotry central and a Killer serve ...

 

The pond has safely landed, which is more than can be said for some unfortunates, but is still getting its proverbial horse manure together.

A lot has happened since the pond took a temporary leave of absence, but the pond takes the view briefly promoted in that Don Henley song The Boys of Summer:

Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac
A little voice inside my head said, “Don't look back, you can never look back”
I thought I knew what being a dedicated herpetology student was, what did I know?
Those days are gone forever, I should just let those reptile rantings go ...

Even with the chaos and anarchy of new surroundings, and even with the letting go, how could the pond miss the opportunity to be an Our Henry completist?

But when the pond went there, the cupboard was bare. No Henry in sight, he'd done a bunk and disappeared into the night.

Instead there was endless musings on the Haines tragedy, for which only the infallible Pope would serve ...

And the immortal Rowe had a thought for Murdochians and reptiles everywhere ...

The pond was pleased to discover that amidst the carnage, there was still room for an old-fashioned serve of bigotry ...

The pond is always astonished at the way that the lizard Oz can drag this sort of rhetoric out of dank darkness and into the view of the hive mind ...

Stop right there. 

Let's go back a little further than Magna Carta. 

The pond has been paying attention to the LRB (not the band), and became befuddled working out what or who was exactly a Briton or a Britain while reading Pablo Scheffer's Frightened Chicks ...

...It is into this society that the first of the ‘Angles or Saxons’ arrived. Though the events surrounding their appearance remain mysterious, Higham agrees with Bede and Gildas (and most modern scholars) that they were invited by the early British kings. One of the knottiest issues facing the rulers, he writes, was ‘how to both maintain social order and secure themselves against external attack, pending the return of imperial troops’. British society had been demilitarised for centuries, and many of its experienced soldiers had disappeared with the imperial forces. Equipping an army can’t have been easy at a time when farmers were struggling to get decent ploughs. Gildas thought the decision to task outsiders with the island’s defence was an act of ‘desperate and crude mental dullness’, but at the time it must have seemed uncontroversial: Romans had for many years been hiring barbarian foederati to protect the northern frontiers.

The archaeological record over the next century and a half shows Anglo-Saxon settlements spreading like inkblots across the British landscape, starting in the south-east (where the mercenaries may originally have been stationed as coastguards) then moving gradually north and west. By the late ninth century, the English kingdoms stretched from Exeter in the south-west to Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth in the north-east. (Like the Romans, the English didn’t make it to Strathclyde and the lands beyond the Forth, which remained culturally Celtic.) Two questions in particular have been the subject of debate. How did the incomers g0 from being a few small rebellious bands to a dominant cultural and economic force? And what happened to the Britons?

The traditional​ account follows Bede’s description of the Anglo-Saxons’ raising an army, massacring or displacing the natives and filling the empty land with Germanic farmers – what the historian David Dumville once described as a ‘cultural genocide following resisted invasion and colonisation’. Reading the early notices in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, it’s hard to disagree. ‘In this year Ælle and his three sons, Cymen, Wlencing and Cissa, came with three ships to the land of Britain,’ the entry for 477 states, ‘and there killed many Britons and drove others in flight to the wood.’ By the time the annal was put to parchment in the ninth century the British had been rechristened wealas (foreigners), a term that was soon used to refer to slaves and which eventually provided the name for Wales, a Celtic stronghold beyond the grasp of the English kings. One of the more unflattering Old English riddles hinges on a double entendre about a wonfeax Wale – a dark-haired slave girl, or a dark-haired British woman – who has been feorran broht (brought from afar). That the woman in question is described as alien suggests that the perceived connection between the British and their old heartlands had been comprehensively severed.

Many Britons appear to have fled to Wales in the fifth and sixth centuries. Linguistic evidence shows that Latin speakers – the former elites – retreated west, where they fortified old settlements and reoccupied abandoned Roman forts. Welsh court poets began calling the lost lowland territory ‘Lloegyr’: a foreign land, inhabited by foreign people. Other Britons went to the Continent, establishing enclaves in Galicia and Brittany (where Celtic Breton is spoken to this day). Yet Higham persuasively rejects both the idea that the Anglo-Saxons had a large army and that the Britons were fully displaced. Drawing on archaeological and legal evidence, the picture he paints is of a steady trickle of small warbands crossing the North Sea, settling in fertile valleys, killing or expelling the local landowners and subjugating the peasants.

These first ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were far from homogeneous: analysis of DNA in early English graves shows they came from as far away as Norway and Gaul. And, at least initially, this was not a total conquest. Some areas remained under nominal British control as late as the seventh century. Parts of Hertfordshire, for instance, seem to have resisted English encroachment for decades, stubbornly remaining in their old Roman towns and worshipping their old Christian cults. The name of the small river Beane, which winds from Stevenage to Hertford, probably comes from a Brittonic word akin to the Welsh bychan (‘little’). Members of certain early royal lineages later claimed by the English had distinctly British names: Cerdic, the first king of Wessex, whom Alfred the Great claimed as an ancestor, and the Mercian kings Pybba and Penda. The name of Æthelwealh, the last independent king of Sussex in the seventh century, translates to ‘noble Briton’. It’s not known whether these men were part Celtic by descent, or simply named in an insular tradition. But Higham suggests that this was a time of ‘strong regional identities, some of which may have been more or less British’.

Subjugated islanders probably made up the majority of the population in the new English enclaves. They are almost invisible in the archaeological record, however, which is dominated by the free English farmers, or ceorls (churls), who ruled over them. Although in time the word ‘churl’ would carry distinctly unaristocratic associations, the richer among the early ceorls were served by enslaved cupbearers and commanded dependants known as hlafæta (loaf-eaters). Higham sees them as central to the spread of Englishness. It was through the ceorls, he argues, that the English language, customs and material culture became markers not just of ethnic identity but of social position. Over a number of generations, as the ceorls conquered and exploited more and more British-held lands (which in time cohered into the first Anglo-Saxon kingdoms), their mores came to be adopted by anyone seeking higher status.

What a mess, what a melting pot, what a multicultural storm of confusion, but as we were talking about historical amnesia, why not go there?

And so to the final serve of rancid bigotry, and waddya kno, he tried to revert by serving up a billy goat butt, dressed up in the form of a "yet" ...

The pond was reminded of another recent read, by a certain Brendan Nicholson, that caught the eye, and which evoked recent pond experiences in the area of medical care ... Before weighing into the immigration debate, spend a night in hospital (*intermittent archive)

It’s time for a serious reality check.

Anyone trying to weigh the so-called “immigration debate” should spend some time in an Australian hospital.

Immigration is being used cynically as a political wedge by those harking after a long-gone monoculture without regard for facts or practical consequences.

I recently spent several days in hospital where my experience before, during and after an operation demonstrated how deluded and dangerous this low-grade politics is. Any healthcare experience is a reminder that more than half the Australian population was born overseas or has at least one parent born overseas. My blood samples were taken days before by technicians of Nepalese and Indian heritage. The taxi driver who turned up at 5.40am to take me to hospital was a cheerful bloke from Delhi who took me straight to the correct entrance in a sprawl of medical facilities.

I was prepared for my operation by a nurse of Nepalese origin. Then I was put under by an alert anaesthetist from India who’d rung me in advance to check on a mistake I’d made in my paperwork.

The surgery was carried out by an excellent doctor of Pakistani origin, who explained carefully and clearly before the operation what would be done, and why. Over the next five days I was cared for by nurses whose families were from India, Nepal, the Philippines, Tibet and Ethiopia; a cosmopolitan mix of Muslims, Hindus, Christians and others, along with several we would once have classified as Anglo-Celtics.

If the politicians pushing the anti-immigration line could instantly send most of these people “home”, those of us connected to medical devices would have awakened to a largely still and silent building, sadly missing their skills and cheerful approach.

The anti-immigration lot will throw up their hands and say that of course they don’t mean to banish “those” immigrants. That’s not the point.

The reality is that with an ageing population and declining birthrate, cynically harking back to the White Australia era risks unleashing racism that can dishearten and discourage people that our workforce badly needs.

That lowest common denominator debate and the way it’s being delivered – basically blaming immigrants for everything – is highly offensive, unsophisticated and riddled with misinformation and contradictions.

Having a multicultural society brings great benefits and we’ll be in serious trouble if they all go “home”. Certainly, fix any rorts but leave the rest alone...

And so on, and well yes Brendan, but you can't stop bigots doing what bigots gotta do ...

While the pond won't be looking back at assorted reptile stews, now fetid and ruined by exposure to the noon day Tamworth sun, there are plenty of 'toons worth catching up with ... including the immortal Rowe, staying in the bigot spray moment ...

And so to Killer, and the pond apologises for the use of caps, but it's part of the readjustment and the returning ...as Killer headed into Mike Pence territory, the man the MAGA mob wanted to hang ...

The Mont Pelerin Society? Birds of a Hayekian feather flocking together, but as Killer mentioned potholes ...

And so on, and the trouble with a pothole analysis is that you're liable to end up in a pothole, but you hardly expect a mob of insular academics and lickspittle fellow travellers to get out on the back roads ... I Drove An Empty Two Lane Road Into Never Before Seen Indiana

The pond doesn't usually stick in an AV distraction in the middle of a reptile rant, but confessing to a letch for backroads decline and decay seemed appropriate, what with Killer infatuated with Killer buildings celebrating the killing fields ...

Good old Mike Pence ...

Sorry, the pond is incredibly distracted, and struggling to cope with this plunge back into the hive mind...

Big Pharma? That's genuine commerce?

They're just as much in bed with government as Uncle Leon is (and lordy lordy is he into government subsidies in a big way)

Lilly and U.S. government agree to expand access to obesity medicines to millions of Americans

Medicare beneficiaries with obesity or overweight will have access to  Zepbound and orforglipron, if approved, at $50 a month  

INDIANAPOLIS, Nov. 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) today announced an agreement with the U.S. government to expand access to its obesity medicines and reduce patient costs. The agreement builds on Lilly's longstanding commitment to finding solutions with policymakers that improve access to life-changing medicines. In 2020, Lilly partnered with the Trump Administration on a pilot program that paved the way for Lilly to be the first company to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 per month. Lilly will now improve access to nearly 40 million Americans living with obesity on government insurance programs and millions more who pay out-of-pocket. Unlocking access to these medicines can be game-changing for Americans with obesity – a risk factor driving more than 200 associated diseases, including heart disease, strokes and certain types of cancers.

"Today marks a pivotal moment in U.S. health care policy and a defining milestone for Lilly, made possible through collaboration with the Trump Administration. As we expand access to obesity treatments for more Americans and advance one of the most innovative obesity pipelines, we remain focused on improving outcomes, strengthening the U.S. healthcare system, and contributing to the health of our nation for generations to come," said David A. Ricks, Lilly chair and CEO. "This agreement adds to our established commitment to affordability – from being the first company to cap insulin out-of-pocket costs at $35 per month to launching LillyDirect, an end-to-end digital healthcare experience."

The only tragedy is that the company couldn't manage to screw the Australian taxpayer and the federal government and type 2 diabetes sufferers, but no doubt they'll keep trying ...

And that brought the pond to the last Killer gobbet ...

That's more than enough Hayekian nonsense for early in the morning, especially as there's been a great betrayal and a few consequent 'toons ...

Speaking of the joys of public execution ...