In which the pond goes Latin mass before turning to Lord Downer, the onion muncher and Major Mitchell ..

 

The pond isn't going to go into the funeral it attended, which was a private affair in the form of a Catholic communion mass, but did want to note one aspect of the service.

But first an anecdote. A long, long time ago, in a Tamworth far away, wreathed in the mists of time, the pond attended St Dominic's Catholic school, run by Dominican nuns in what was then obligatory full penguin gear. (Later the site was sold, the building demolished and the space turned into a car park).

After lying about sins in confession to get a quick 'all clear' from a mysterious priest tucked away behind a screen ("disobedience" was always handy, as was in later times "impure thoughts") and saying the odd cleansing Hail Mary, students were obliged to attend mass at the next door St Nick's.

One time after the priest had stuck a wafer on the pond's tongue (a feat involving some dexterity) a wafer fragment got stuck in the pond's teeth. 

Wandering back to the pew, the pond began to poke at this disagreeable bit of wafer with a finger in an attempt to dislodge it... when whack, a nun's hand delivered a sharp blow to the pond's cheek, the sound reverberating through the church.

Then she she leaned in, face contorted in anger, hissing words to the effect: "Don't you ever dare touch the body of Christ".

At that cheek-reddening, flesh-bruising moment, the pond was enlightened. 

This wafer was no symbolic token gesture, this wafer was the actual body of Christ. 

The pond was committing an act of flesh-eating cannibalism, of the same genus as all those cannibal stories that littered children's adventure fiction. 

It was ... transubstantiation. (The official word for the concept came later to the pond. If you've never been there, you'll probably never get it.)

Let no filthy, grubby paw, or digit, get in the way of the magical moment when a priest put Christ's flesh on tongue, and the recipient gobbles down actual human flesh with pious relish.

Fast forward, and in the funeral service the pond was aghast, shocked and disturbed to see the priest passing out wafers to the grubby, grasping paws of the congregation. Then they could stuff the wafers in their mouths by themselves. 

It was still flesh eating, but it was somehow prosaic and sordid, entirely without magic.

The last funeral communion mass the pond attended had been in pre-Covid days, and apparently this variation was introduced as a way to help deal with Covid.

The pond urgently wanted the opinion of Robert Kennedy on this, but he was too busy attending to a raccoon penis. Still the pond wondered whether mixing a little Ivermectin into the holy water might not have been a better solution, thereby allowing the priest to still deliver magical wafer direct to tongue. 

The pond thought of that Dominican nun, now probably long dead, and wondered how she might have coped with this new age of heresy.

Eventually a sullen pond began to mutter the responses under breath in best Mel Gibson style - "Et cum spiritu tuo", "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccáta mundi, miserére nobis", and so on, proving that years of indoctrination can survive a long time, and that while you can take an ex-Catholic out of the church, you can't take the church out of the ex-Catholic. (You are with Mel, JD, in a love of the Latin mass, aren't you?)

And speaking of heretics, it's time for reptiles filling the hive mind of the lizard Oz with odious, grubby thoughts...

Today it's all about the war and mad King Donald and the bumbling incompetence of him and his minions, and naturally the reptiles were out and about looking for excuses and people to blame.

Lord Downer led the way ...

The header: Progressive left backs our enemies, kills our economy; The policies of the left are driven by its ideology. They’re driven by the vibe.

The caption for an image designed to terrify the hive mind: Iranian women part in a rally to pay tribute to women killed during the Middle East war, in Tehran. Picture: AFP

Progressives kill the economy? Be fair, no progressive could manage the amount of damage inflicted on the world economy by mad King Donald and his minions, by way of tariff wars and meaningless wars of choice.

But Lord Downer is never inclined to be fair, he's more inclined to be relentlessly stupid ...

If ever you wanted evidence that the progressive left has taken over most of the key institutions of the Western world in recent years, have a look at how the West has reacted to the Iran war. First, much of the progressive left in the liberal democratic world clearly hopes that a brutal autocracy such as Iran’s wins the war against America and Israel.
The progressive left hates Donald Trump more than it loathes the Iranian theocracy. The left doesn’t care that Iran, especially through its proxies, has been at war with Israel since 1979. When the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps massacred 40,000 people at the end of last year and early this year, the progressive left didn’t care, just as it doesn’t care about the estimated 150,000 people who have been killed in the Sudan civil war and the 12 million displaced. It doesn’t care about rockets being fired on behalf of Iran into Israel daily. All it cares about is the horror of Israel defending itself. As is said of the ABC’s international reporting, “no Jews, no news”.
Secondly, the Iran war has demonstrated how utterly self-defeating Western energy policies – driven by the intense advocacy of the progressive left – have been over the past two decades.
Nowhere has this fecklessness been truer than in our own country. Instead of urging the Iranians to agree to American demands to end arming and directing proxies in the Middle East, desist from developing ballistic missiles and other weapons to threaten their neighbours, and to abandon their nuclear program, what does the Australian government do? It urges de-escalation. That’s it. Not consistent condemnation of Iran, but implicit neutrality. We all know why. It’s about domestic politics.

And what would crusader Lord Downer have us do? Hie off to the strait to join the crusade in all its folly? Quick, another snap designed to terrify the hive mind into fear and submission ... Supporters of the Iran-backed Houthi movement brandish their weapons as they rally in solidarity with Iran and Lebanon in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on April 17. Picture: AFP

Terrifying, but warrior Lord Downer is made of stern stuff, and didn't wilt ...

President Trump isn’t popular, so the war is not popular. What is more, there are all those left-wing voters in parts of Sydney and Melbourne who hope Iran will be able to see off the Americans and the Israelis. So the Prime Minister and his ministers are very careful not to be too supportive of our ally, who is the guarantor of the security of the Western world and way of life.
The Iran war has also laid bare the absurdity of the energy policies Australia has been pursuing for the past 20 years. Despite the tens of billions of dollars poured into renewables, still 92 per cent of Australia’s energy consumption comes from fossil fuels. But the progressive left – in particular, the Labor Party and the Greens – has spent two decades railing against fossil fuel exploitation in Australia. It has given an impression that Australia is enjoying an energy transition of great rapidity, and this is going to generate cheaper energy. We will also reduce global temperatures.

Ah, the old fossil fuel routine, but the pond has done enough celebrating of the joys of EVs. 

Quick, instead produce another image designed to terrify the hive mind ... Iranian women brandish their rifles as they take part in a rally to pay tribute to women killed during the Middle East war. Picture: AFP

It would take more than a few women to deter His Lordship, but what with the war being a bit of a mess, he soon had to veer off into all sorts of thickets and weeds ...

Anybody with a practical bent of mind will be interested in the results. Not only have we contributed precisely nothing to abating global temperature but, alarmingly, the level of productivity in the Australian energy sector has declined by about 30 per cent over the past 20 years. That means we require substantially more capital investment for the same level of output. No wonder Australia’s electricity prices have increased by about 60 per cent in that period.
Well, as soon as the Strait of Hormuz was closed, reality struck home. We’re still hugely dependent on fossil fuels, and the energy transition has made energy more expensive, and we have had literally no impact whatsoever on the climate over the past 20 years.
Not surprisingly, corporates have been reluctant to invest in searching for and developing oilfields in and off Australia, as well as being restricted in their capacity to drill for gas.
What is extraordinary is that our governments, dominated by the progressive left, have discouraged the development of known exploitable onshore and offshore oilfields.
Let’s take two examples. Recently, the Queensland government announced it would give approval for the development of the Taroom Trough oil and gas field. This is the first development of an oilfield in Australia in 50 years. Yet for years the progressive left has wanted to leave it untouched. Secondly, and more dramatically, Santos has discovered a vast oil and gas field known as Dorado off the coast of Western Australia. Santos estimates this contains about 150 million barrels of oil, so it’s a sizeable deposit. It’s roughly the equivalent of Australia’s current total annual production of oil. If the Dorado deposit were exploited, it would give Australia significantly greater self-sufficiency in oil.
So why hasn’t Santos gone ahead and invested in the exploitation of Dorado?
The answer is illustrative of everything that’s wrong with the progressive left approach to energy policies. Santos have just weathered years of litigation to get the Barossa gas field off the coast of the Northern Territory up and running. It has been bogged down in litigation, driven by the Environmental Defenders Office, which gets $2m a year in funding from the federal Labor government.
Ultimately, Santos held off these challenges, but at substantial cost to the company. More than that, this litigation damaged Australia’s reputation as a country to invest in.
At the same time as discovering the Dorado oilfield, Santos also discovered an oil deposit in Alaska. The company decided it was far less risky and therefore far more profitable for its shareholders to proceed with the Alaska project.
There you have it. As a result of the policies of the progressive left, we failed to develop millions of barrels of oil offshore in Australia, oil, which would have given us genuine energy security.
So for the past four years, we’ve had a federal government opposed to fossil fuels, and suddenly it’s crying crocodile tears about a shortage of oil supplies because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Prime Minister is burning up fossil fuels flying to Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia, begging them not to withdraw their supply of fossil fuels to Australia.
By the way, it’s not as if they would. The trips are just a political stunt.
That’s the progressive left for you. Policies are driven by its ideology. They’re driven by the vibe, not Australia’s tradition of practical policymaking.

Driven by the vibe? This hapless old antique is as ancient as The Castle, but without the first clue as to how to do comedy ...

The pond's mission this day is simply to line up a few reptiles for the pleasure of correspondents.

Sadly the pond couldn't spot the Caterist early in the morning and so had to settle for the onion muncher, a truly wretched and depressing thought ...

The header: PM’s begging tour exposes fuel security ignorance; As prime minister, I reluctantly accepted the official advice that efficient global markets meant that maintaining 90 days’ supply of liquid fuels onshore was no longer necessary. But now it’s critical.

The caption: Brunei's Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah (left), Crown Prince Al-Muhtadee Billah (centre) and Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese walk after their official luncheon at Istana Nurul Iman in Bandar Seri Begawan on April 15. Picture: AFP

The pond hopes such onion muncher appearances aren't going to become a regular feature of the lizard Oz.

With his time as lickspittle sycophantic stooge in service to Viktor Mihály Orbán now over, the suck might now think he's out of a job, and in his narcissist way, turn to the lizard Oz to maintain his feeble attempt at relevance ...

Is he going to keep turning up in the lizard Oz to rabbit on in ways that will please other authoritarians? Is that the sort of punishment the reptiles are lining up for the hive mind? 

The on-again, off-again reopening of the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t mean that Australia can take fuel security for granted. This is actually our second wake-up call about over-reliance on global supply chains and we can’t afford to go back to sleep once more, as we did after the first.
As prime minister, I reluctantly accepted the official advice that efficient global markets meant that maintaining 90 days’ supply of liquid fuels onshore was no longer necessary. The global scramble for masks, surgical gowns and vaccines during the pandemic made it obvious that, in an emergency, it would be every country for itself.
In its wake, the Morrison government asked the Productivity Commission to consider our supply chain vulnerability but – remarkably – its report hardly mentioned fuel security, even though no country on Earth is as dependent on fuel imports.
The Prime Minister’s begging tour around Asia, shows just how exposed we are to any disruption in global fuel supply. The month’s supply of petrol, diesel, avgas and jet fuel that we supposedly had at the start of the Iran war included only about three weeks’ worth that was actually onshore. The rest was cargoes at sea that, in extremis, could be sunk, or possibly diverted to other destinations in the event of a major threat to shipping.

Of course the joke is ...

Never gets old that one, but of course the narcissist is more interested in posing as relevant by having a snap of himself, preening into the void ... Tony Abbott. Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

Why is the lizard Oz filled to the brim with deadbeat ancient politicians who proved completely useless when in power?

Who knows, it's just a matter of getting through it ...

Iran’s denial of freedom of navigation through the Strait did not interfere with the actual delivery of refined products to Australia so much as the delivery of crude oil to the Asian refineries we buy from. Even so, the pump price of diesel in Australia almost doubled, about 10 per cent of our servos ran out of some or all stock due to panic buying, airlines started to cancel flights, and ports, mines and farms suddenly had to reconsider their operations.
While the Albanese government gave assurances that supplies were guaranteed until May, there could be no assurances beyond that because friendly countries (such as Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia) could not be sure of their own stock, and unfriendly ones (such as China) had already suspended deliveries.
The Prime Minister’s “fuel diplomacy coup” in securing two extra deliveries, each of 100 million litres, sounded impressive but actually constituted less than two days’ total Australian consumption. What’s more, it bordered on deranged for the government to insist that further electrification was the long-term solution to the fuel crisis, even while the PM was pleading for extra petrol and diesel.
Here’s the key point: a conflict in East Asia – such as Beijing attempting to coerce Taiwan – would not just close down deliveries of crude oil; it would close down the deliveries of refined products too.

Naturally there's a snap of the deviant to blame - not mad King Donald, but another miscreant, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

And then it's on to the usual blather about oils and whatever you do don't mention renewables or alternative sources of energy, because this is a bear with little by way of brains, having always been a few knights short of a BBQ ...

There would be no question of being able to trade security of gas supplies from Australia for security of fuel supplies from Southeast Asia because the moment hostilities in East Asia were imminent, the shipping lanes carrying 50 per cent of the world’s trade would shut down.
It would take months for protected convoys to be arranged, even if the tankers and container ships could be procured to sail in them; and that’s assuming Australia and its allies had the requisite naval strength.
It’s worth noting that the US did not even try to counter the closure of the Strait of Hormuz either by landing troops at key choke points or by escorting ships through. It was the US’s counter-blockade of Iran’s ports, doing to Iran what it was doing to others’ shipping, that might have created a breakthrough.
Countries such as Britain and France, that might once have considered forcing the Strait, were adamant they could only secure the passage of shipping once hostilities had ceased. In other words, the task of protecting shipping seems to have become much harder in the era of smart mines and drone swarms. Which makes it more important than ever not to be dependent on just-in-time deliveries for the essentials of daily life.
It’s crystal clear what Australia now needs to do to avoid massive domestic upheaval when the next supply crisis comes, as it almost inevitably will.
First, we need to build the 90 days of fuel reserves onshore that the International Energy Agency mandates. Much of this could be done by assisting large fuel users to expand their private storages.
Second, we need to resume exploration, extraction and refining of crude oil here. The development of new fields, such as Queensland’s Taroom Trough, needs to become an urgent national priority rather than being bogged down endlessly, as would normally now be the case, in environmental assessments and activist lawfare.
Third, we need to expand our capacity to defend and maintain sea lanes via a more capable navy, a recreated Australian National Line, and detailed contingency planning with our military partners.
While it’s quite likely that the US made no formal request for Australian military assistance, given the last-minute nature of its decision-making, once it became clear that hostilities were likely, Australia should have volunteered to help. There’s no doubt the RAAF could have made a significant contribution to the US and Israeli air campaign to destroy the Iranian war machine, had the Albanese government been able to overcome its visceral antipathy to President Donald Trump, tilt against Israel, attachment to the fantasy of “international law”, and fondness for military announcements that make no appreciable difference to our near-term military capability.
Resuming our strategic intimacy with America and accepting that our ongoing need for fossil fuels should trump climate concerns will almost certainly be too much for the ideologues in the current government. Immediate crisis averted, the PM will insist nothing really needs to change – even though almost everything does.

The pond almost regrets that Orbán went down. 

What a relief it was to have the onion muncher abroad, doing his authoritarian suck, rather than being at home doing his mad King Donald suck ...

Here the pond should pause to note that not all the reptiles were sounding triumphant.

The lizard Oz editorialist was sounding quite glum and uncertain ...

Oh dear, King Donald should stop complimenting himself and claiming victory for the umpteenth time?

That surely can't stand. Quick, wheel in Major Mitchell, Zionist in chief for the Australian Daily Zionist News, to compliment King Donald and claim victory for the umpteenth time ...

The header: Iran’s media cheer squad can’t stomach Trump’s success; Donald Trump’s language is erratic, and the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is not without risk. But the truth is that in the first six weeks of the war, Iran has sustained heavy setbacks.

The caption for a snap of the deeply weird, possibly demented, certainly barking mad king: President Donald Trump dances at a roundtable event last week. Picture: AP

Trump's success? 

Only in the richly perverse world of Major Mitchell would a reptile try on that sort of clowning.

So much winning, the pond doesn't know where to begin, but the Major does ...because it's all the fault of weevils and white ants, and if you believe that, you qualify for the Major's "paranoid delusion" award of the week ...

Yes, just like Lord Downer, when in doubt, blame the meejia ...

Reporting about the Iran war is so coloured by media hostility toward US President Donald Trump that almost none of it reflects the truth about Iran’s military frailty, economic malaise or currency collapse.
When Trump responded to Iran’s decision to block the Strait of Hormuz and charge a toll on boats seeking safe passage by deciding that the US could do that too, few journalists thought that it was fair enough, or would even work.
The ABC regularly gives equal airtime to US claims and Iranian denials, even though Iran has lied about its weapons ambitions for decades.
Old leftie reporters on social media who claim the Iranian nuclear program is an Israeli lie should wonder why at last week’s talks in Islamabad the Iranians refused to delay their nuclear program for more than five years. And why possess uranium enriched to 60 per cent if not for weapons?
Trump was wrong not to anticipate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps would try to cause maximum global economic damage by shutting the Strait of Hormuz.
National Review reported on March 14 that General Dan Caine, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, had warned Trump about Hormuz before the war started on February 28.
Journalists have a duty to hold Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to account for failures. But journalists also have a duty to report the truth, and the truth is Iran and its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies are either on their knees or completely defeated, as is the case in Syria.
The New York Times pretends Trump did not have specific war aims. That’s rubbish. Trump has been saying publicly for more than a decade that Iran’s mullahs should never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the timing of the attack was influenced by intelligence suggesting Iran was both rebuilding its weapons stockpiles after the 12-day war the previous June, and was in the process of acquiring hypersonic anti-ship missiles from China.

Liddle Marco? Didn't his contribution amount to a trip to the UFC? US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Picture: AFP

Not that one ... this one, trading on stolen valour, ersatz toughness and boofhead glory ...

 

The Major wasn't worried about any of that.

As usual, he'd managed to rope in assorted weird sources, what with his speciality offering insights via whatever the cat had dragged in ...

Rubio told a press conference on March 2 that Iran was building 100 missiles a month.
“Compare that to the six or seven interceptors that can be built in a month,” he said.
If the US did not attack when it did, Iran would soon have had enough weapons to swamp Israel’s defences and American bases in the region.
In such circumstances, any fair-minded reading of the first six weeks of the war would conclude that Iran had sustained heavy setbacks.
New York Times’ star columnist Thomas Friedman, a supporter of Israel but not of Netanyahu, summed up the approach of much of the media. Speaking on a CNN podcast on April 11, he said he wanted to see the regime in Tehran destroyed but added: “I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings”.
Michael Doran, director of the Centre for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Husdon Institute and a former senior director at the US National Security Council, nailed his assessment of the media and the war in Tablet Magazine on April 14: “Trump has inflicted heavy punishment in return for relatively light consequences, but pundits insist that a masterful Iran is dictating events,” he writes.
Serious journalists in Australia run the line that Iran has Trump on the run.

After that the Major came up with a doozy:

Trump leads a democracy. 

Whatever the status of the banana republic known as the United States is these days, a democracy isn't the first thought that springs to mind.

Kleptocracy, maybe? Has there ever been rule by a bigger bunch of thieves since the days of the robber barons?

Facing midterm elections later this year, he must have an eye on prices Americans face at the petrol pump and in supermarkets. In Iran and Gaza, politicians do not have to care what their people think. Indeed, the survival of their regimes is far more important to them than the wellbeing of their people.
Unlike Western media surrender urgers, expat Iranian analysts thought Trump’s first big mistake was agreeing to a truce and peace talks, which they say gave the Iranians the idea Trump was contemplating backing down on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.
Now the US media’s Iranian cheerleaders can’t see how a US blockade can succeed, but it is.
Doran’s piece outlines how most of the left media criticism of the war is driven by former Barack Obama and Joe Biden Democrats who were involved in attempts to broker better relations between the US and Iran in 2013 during Obama’s presidency. Doran says the political forces opposing Trump and Netanyahu inside the US are an unlikely amalgam of the globalist left with the isolationist right, including people such as Tucker Carlson.

Again if that's success, the pond would hate to see chaos and losing when it comes to actually achieving the strange conglomerate of aims announced at the start of proceedings, including the freeing of the Iranian people, and the end of the mad Mullahs.

Best drag in ancient politicians of the Obama, Biden kind ot take the blame ... Former president Barack Obama. Picture: AFP

So much easier to look back, rather than focus on the mad King and his delusional minions ...

“Along with a common set of enemies in Trump and Netanyahu, the Progressives and America Firsters share a dislike of American global leadership and the use of military force, and therefore they both excuse the behaviour of America’s enemies while blaming it for any conflict,” Doran writes.
Traditional conservatives see Iran as a revolutionary theocracy “committed to the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of the US from the Middle East”. Conservatives believe Iran, China, Russia and North Korea want to “overturn the American led global order’’.
Former Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan argues Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action stabilised Iranian relations until Trump pulled out in his first term in May 2018. Yet Tehran did not start enriching uranium to 60 per cent until April 2021.
“In other words, Iran made this crucial leap towards weaponisation under Biden, not Trump,” Doran writes.
Biden responded with sanctions relief which “funded missiles, drones and proxies”.
Doran says the Biden administration framed Hamas’s October 7 attack in southern Israel as a Palestinian issue.
“This framing advanced the fiction that America was not involved in the war. It also absolved Iran of any responsibility for the mass atrocities and hostage-taking of its proxy, Hamas, thus allowing the (Biden) administration to preserve its diplomatic outreach to Tehran.”
Iran immediately mobilised its entire proxy axis “in an assymetric war against the American Alliance system”.
Iranian-backed forces launched strikes on US bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan as well as on US naval vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
“In any previous era … (this) would have been called open war. The Biden administration called it historic peace.”

As often happens with the reptiles, the Major tried to introduce a few billy goat butts, to hint that he wasn't entirely mad ...

They took the form of "of courses":

Of course Trump’s language is erratic. And of course the US blockade of Hormuz does not come without risks, including a possible Chinese response to US attempts to turn back tankers bound for China. 

But these billy goat butts are just window dressing, and so the Major immediately reversed them with another "butt":

But Trump is correct that the world cannot afford to allow a bunch of medieval fanatics to control a major global sea lane and hold the world economy to ransom.

The pond can't quite see the Major's problem. After all a bunch of medieval - actually old testament biblical - are currently in charge of the government of Israel, and holding King Donald to ransom, in pursuit of ethnic cleansing and a greater Israel, but never mind ... we must just hope it'll all work out, in due course ...

What if the IRGC sees the financial logic of Trump’s move and comes back to the negotiating table? By Wednesday, the UN and Trump thought this imminent.
And by Thursday the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were reporting the US blockade seemed to be working. The Jerusalem Post reported intelligence sources believed Iran could survive without oil sales for less than three months.
The Jerusalem Post reported an unnamed Iranian spokesperson suggesting Iran might let all ships pass the Strait of Hormuz if they stuck to the southern Oman side and the US lifted its blockade. Imagine that. A siege – one of the world’s oldest military strategies – might actually work. How will The New York Times frame that as a Trump negative?

Perhaps first see that it works? And then worry about the framing?

Ain't been that much knockdown glory yet.

The Major should hope it isn't just another mad ploy by a desperate King and minions of the Kegsbreath and Kash kind.

And now, as the pond began with a religious service, time to end with a serve of supper (watch out for the wafers) ...

But there is still hope, because surely we can all agree...

In which the pond takes a road trip, but has time to catch up with Our Henry and prattling Polonius, dissing the Pope in mad King Donald war monger mode ...

 

The pond set out for Melbourne last Thursday, desperate to prove the reptiles wrong, determined to show that an EV could make the trip in a reasonable time.

Alas, things went wrong from the start. There was a five hour queue at Yass, and a slow charger, so add another two hours. The pond had so much time on its hands it attended a double bill at the restored Liberty theatre, and took in a service with Pastor Dave.

At Woodonga, things were so slow, an Islamic family got out the prayer mat and did their thing. Imagine the pond's terror - fancy proposing any reptile witness such proceedings in the fenced off exit to an expired burger store.

Then it was off to the mighty Wang for a top up, but everything was closed. The pond limped into Melbourne in the wee hours with all sense of time lost and a sense that the reptiles would be gloating for years at a nightmare 24 hour folly in a vehicle that cost somewhere north of the family home.

Hang on, hang on, for a real account of what happened, please see below.

In the interim, the pond must earn its keep and offer a message from the reptiles.

It being a disjointed weekend, the best the pond could do when near a computer was make an offering of ancient Henry, taken from the lizard Oz back on Friday.

As a blog of record, the pond doesn't like to miss the hole in bucket man, and this was a Zionist doozy, entirely fitting for the Australian Daily Zionist News:

The header: Pope Leo is guilty of repudiating the ‘just war’ doctrine; That our government has urged Israel to stand down confirms its moral evasiveness; that Pope Leo has done likewise is grievous.

The caption for the wayward Pope: Pope Leo XIV presides over the Easter vigil as part of the Holy Week celebrations, at St Peter's basilica in the Vatican. Picture: AFP

It should go without saying that Our Henry is up for the killing fields, especially when it's the current government of Israel doing the killing, and he was at it full bore in this outing ...

“Peace,” said Saint Augustine, “is so great a good that even in relation to the affairs of earth and our mortal state, nothing is desired with greater longing, nor can anything better be found.” Yet Augustine was no pacifist. He knew that in a fallen world, peace cannot be secured by permitting evil to go unchecked.
That hard truth was conspicuously absent from the Easter interventions of Pope Leo XIV on the wider war in the Middle East, and notably in Lebanon. Absent, too, was any serious engagement with one of Christianity’s greatest intellectual legacies: the doctrine of just war.
The doctrine did not emerge in a vacuum. Its roots lie in Hebrew scripture’s insistence that even war stands under judgment, and that those who wage it are accountable to a higher law.
The narrative of Jephthah in the Book of Judges makes the point: before war is joined, grievances are rehearsed, and an appeal is made to justice. War follows only – yet follows legitimately – when those claims fail, despite efforts to secure redress. Within that framework, wars of self-defence are not merely permitted; repelling an unjust attacker, or one who is imminently so, is a duty.
Complementing the biblical inheritance was the Greek tradition, which, finding its highest expression in Cicero, grounded the doctrine in ethics. War, Cicero argued in criticising conflicts “fought for conquest and glory”, is justified only as a last resort, engaged to correct a grievous wrong. Coining a formulation that would endure through the ages, he added that “the sole excuse for going to war is that we may live in peace” – that is, that the war’s aim must be to remove the adversary’s capacity and will to pursue aggression, allowing a measure of tranquillity to prevail.
Steeped in the Hebrew Bible and profoundly influenced by Cicero, Augustine joined these strands in his account of just war. It was on the foundations he laid that Thomas Aquinas later set out the doctrine’s canonical formulation. Aquinas did not pursue the utopian goal of abolishing war. He recognised that aggression has to be deterred and resisted; his aim was to subject that necessity to the discipline of Christian morality.
War, in the doctrine that would dominate Christian political theology for centuries, could only be legitimate if a properly constituted sovereign authority waged it – one capable of entering into credible peace settlements. There had to be a just cause: the enemy must have committed a wrong that warrants redress, whether through the violation of rights or the refusal to make restitution.
And those who wage war must have a right intention: they must aim to advance good or avert evil – that is, to thwart cruelty, criminality or the lust for domination. Where those conditions are met, the use of force is both sanctioned and morally justified.
Measured against those criteria, Pope Leo’s assessment of the conflict in Lebanon – and his scarcely veiled criticism of Israel – is seriously ill-considered. After all, none of the key facts is in dispute. Ever since the ceasefire came into effect on November 27, 2024, Hezbollah has systematically violated its conditions.

And there you have it. Cicero the Greek joining with Augustine and on with the killing fields, with Our Henry armed with a fierce lance of righteous blood lust.

This sort of blather could have put the pond in the awkward position of attempting to defend the Catholic church, but the church is more than capable of looking after itself, especially when placed up against the likes of mad King Donald and the genocidal Benji (though the pond did enjoy the late night show joke about the Pope and King Donald having a shared interest in hiding sex scandals).

The reptiles flung in a snap which in other times would have found favour in the Catholic Boys' Daily, Pope Leo XIV. Picture: AFP

Our Henry kept raging away ...

Now operating illegally – following the Lebanese government’s ban on its military activities – it has refused to comply with repeated instructions to disarm. Knowing the Lebanese armed forces are too weak and divided to act, Hezbollah’s vice-president, Mahmoud Comati, told Le Monde last month that were any attempt made to dismantle its arsenal, it stood ready to trigger – and triumph in – a devastating civil war.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has sheltered the Iranian ambassador, whom the government had expelled, and – according to Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Nawaf Salam – has issued hundreds of false passports to foreign fighters associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And it has rained missiles and drones on Israel, overwhelmingly directed at purely civilian targets.
Hezbollah’s aim has never been to protect Lebanon – much less the Maronite community. It has instead dismissed the country as “one of the legacies of imperialism”, to be subsumed in the Islamic state it claims will emerge from “the great confrontation with the aggression of Zionists, Crusaders and world arrogance”. As Hassan Nasrallah put it in 2018, the organisation – far from owing loyalty to Lebanon – proudly sees itself as “an arm of the Iranian government and the Lebanese branch of the Guard Corps”.
Nor has it ever shown any interest in peace. Nasrallah repeatedly described Jews in gro-tesquely dehumanising terms as the “descendants of pigs and apes”, and Israelis as “a people of conquerors, occupiers and rapists of the land” who “must be killed”. Just this week, Hezbollah denounced Lebanon’s negotiations with Israel and declared it would not respect any agreement that might be reached.

Uh huh, and then Our Henry really took a sharp turn to the barking paranoid weird:

The moral implications are obvious. It is inconceivable that the Australian government would stand by were Papua New Guinea’s government unable – or unwilling – to act against an armed band launching missiles into Queensland and avowedly intent on exterminating the “settler colonialists” it denounces as “conquerors, occupiers and rapists of the land”. Deploying the ADF to eliminate the threat would be more than a right; it would be an obligation.

Dear sweet long absent lord, that's the best he could do in drumming up support for the outrageous ongoing behaviour of the current government of Israel? Seems so ...

Exactly the same principle applies here. Israel’s intervention is the surest, indeed only, means of forcing the Lebanese state to face the choice it has long evaded: either bring Hezbollah to heel or leave Israel to do so.

That our own government has urged Israel to stand down simply confirms its moral evasiveness and electoral opportunism; that Pope Leo has done likewise amounts to a grievous repudiation of the just war tradition, which has always upheld the right of nations to defend themselves against aggressors, and to prevent them from striking again.
That tradition is no exultation of war. On the contrary, the Book of Isaiah’s great vision of universal peace – “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares … nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” – testifies to an enduring insight: that war, while sometimes necessary, remains a tragedy, to be constrained, justified, and ultimately transcended.
But the just war doctrine recognises that the lions show no intention of lying down with the lambs. Facing up to that reality, it refuses to assert a false moral equivalence between those who murder and those who seek to stop them. And while praying, as does the Pope, for peace, it knows the charnel house of history creates situations in which the only choice is between evils.
Yes, we must attempt to prevent such situations from arising. But when history thrusts them upon us, we cannot merely dismiss all the alternatives as equally bad and believe the gesture washes our hands clean.
The church’s refusal to condemn Hitler’s genocidal war of aggression indelibly stained its reputation. Now, as he addresses a world crying out for moral guidance, the Pope should remember the truth captured in the Midrash, and classically anchored in the story of King Saul: “Those who are merciful to the cruel will, in the end, be cruel to the merciful.” To believe otherwise is not to advance peace. It is to bury it.

Oh dear, he had to play the Hitler card.

So be it.

Our Henry's refusal to condemn the current government of Israel's genocidal war of aggression, its policy of ethnic cleansing, its lust for a greater Israel no matter the human cost, indelibly stains his reputation, but he's not the only Zionist to peddle a pile of righteous tosh in defence of crimes against humanity.

At this point the pond was determined to make a full sermon of it, and turned to that other pompous pedant, Polonius,  for a serve of his prattle ...

The header: ‘Our barbarian’: Why Christians back Donald Trump; From a controversial post to a widening rift with Pope Leo XIV, the US President’s rhetoric reignites debate over religion, war and political power.

The caption for a snap which allowed the reptiles to avoid running that infamous shot showing a doctoring King Donald curing Jon Stewart of what ailed him: US President Donald Trump’s social media post depicting himself as a Christ-like figure drew criticism and was later deleted. Picture: AFP

Who knew that Polonius would take up the Xian white nationalist cause, but stranger things have happened in the lizard Oz...and here we are, and what a broad minded chap he is all of a sudden ...

I was brought up a Catholic but I am by no means offended by President Donald J. Trump’s decision to post on Truth Social an image of himself as a Christ-like figure blessing a sick or dead man, while prayers are said in the presence of a Red Cross female nurse and a US serviceman with the Statue of Liberty in the background and a US Air Force jet and eagles in the sky overhead.
To me it was a joke, of the non-funny kind. In time Trump deleted the post, claiming he thought it depicted him as a doctor. A good try perhaps. 

A good try perhaps? Oh Polonius, Polonius, is there anything else you can add to your comedy stylings, aka an attempt at justifying the mad King's work?

However, at least the President did not blame a staffer.

Sheesh, but at least there then came a minor billy goat butt ...

The post was extraordinarily unwise since some Christians would view such an image as close to blasphemy. And many Christians voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
Working as a political adviser is difficult enough without having to deal with an erratic president’s late night/early morning posts, which are at times explosive. But there is a bigger picture.
As cardinal George Pell wrote on March 30, 2019, in the first volume of his Prison Journal, “Unfortunately, President Trump is a bit of a barbarian, but in some important ways he is ‘our’ (Christian) barbarian.” Pell added that Trump’s “first two appointments to the Supreme Court will slow down the secular advance because the court there has immense power to shape society”.
Despite the fact, after he avoided assassination during a campaign rally at Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024, Trump claimed to have been saved by God, he does not present as a devout Christian. But he has been supportive of Christians, in the US and elsewhere. Much more so than his predecessor, president Joe Biden, who presented as a Catholic.

Ah, of course the Pellists had to turn up. They always do when Polonius is in the room.

Naturally the reptiles lined up a Sky Noise after dark clown to add a MAGA message to Polonius beclowning himself (still no rebranding of the name?)...

Sky News Washington Analyst Annelise Nielsen believes if US President Donald Trump is strategic after public feud with Pope Leo, it will not have a large impact on votes. “I think it was a bit of a distraction tactic. I think he might have been doing this on purpose,” Ms Nielsen told Sky News Australia. “This isn’t the first time he’s had fights with the Pope. “He’s definitely got to manage the evangelical community.”

Naturally Polonius seized the opportunity to take a walk down Catholic memory lane ...

The current President Trump v Pope Leo XIV controversy would not come as a surprise to Australians who lived through, or are aware about, the first half of the 20th century.
When the Labor Party split in the mid-1950s, Daniel Mannix, the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, was criticised for supporting those who split from/were expelled by the Labor Party and formed the Democratic Labor Party. However, little criticism was made by Norman Gilroy, the Catholic archbishop of Sydney, who urged Catholics to remain in the ALP. Both were involved in politics.
The fact is that Christian clergy have always been engaged in politics, to a greater or lesser extent, in a democratic society.
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was born a Muslim and converted to Christianity, pointed out in a perceptive article in the Daily Mail on April 16, on April 9 Leo met US Democratic Party operative David Axelrod.

Ah, it's a conspiracy with the Democrats.

 And possibly with Marina Hyde, busy explaining Is the pope Catholic? JD Vance thinks he has the answer.

What a hoot of a read that was, and here the pond should note that it's spent some recent time with a Catholic priest who exudes some fair content for King Donald, as did many of the Catholics who attended the funeral which took the pond to Melbourne.

Polonius decided on a contrarian strategy, doing his best to take the side of mad King Donald, by explaining it was all just a "defensive" war:

A few day earlier, Leo issued his Easter message, which declared: “Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them!”
Not surprisingly, those words were interpreted as a criticism of the defensive war waged by the US and Israel against the brutal theocracy Iran intent on crushing what the mullahs call “the Great Satan”, that is the United States, along with Israel.
On April 7, Leo spoke against Trump’s threat to destroy Iran. Again, the President used inappropriate language. It was yet more Trump hyperbole. Leo was reported as describing Trump’s threat as “truly unacceptable”.

Um, it happened to be a statement of genocidal intent, the wiping out of an entire tribe, a war crime of the first water, up there with the genocidal Xian god's eradication of all life on earth, but whatever:

On April 13, Trump fired back – even if he managed only two exclamation marks to Leo’s four. He declared “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy”, going on to state that the Pope “thinks it’s ok for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon”. Trump also referred to Leo’s meeting with Axelrod and advised the Pope to “stop catering to the Radical Left”.
This is the familiar argument that the church should stay out of politics. However, Trump has a point. The Catholic Church is not a pacifist society. It has not always stood for peace as in unilateral disarmament.

Oh dear, here we go, here we go ...

For example, the Catholic Church has always accepted a “just war”.

You've endured Our Henry explaining Catholic theology, you might even have endured the couch molesting JD, now stand by for Polonius...

As Gerald O’Collins SJ and Edward G. Farrugia SJ point out in A Concise Dictionary of Theology (Paulist Press), the just war teaching can be traced back to Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Namely, that war must be defensive and in response to unjust aggression, there must be a reasonable chance of success and deliberate attacks on civilians must be avoided and so on. Pope Pius XII never opposed the Allied forces’ war against Nazi Germany.

Hang on, hang on, shouldn't have Our Henry and Polonius compared notes on the matter of the second world war?

It is known that Leo is critical of the Trump administration’s response to unlawful immigration. However, Benedict XVI in October 2012 declared that “every state has the right to regulate migration”. Sure, the current Pope has his political left-of-centre beliefs. But that does not bind Catholics in what the church depicts as ex cathedra pronouncements.
On April 16, Leo called for an unarmed peace. To some, myself included, that sounds a bit like surrender to the likes of Iran, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, North Korea and so on. And then there is Leo’s silence. As Melanie Phillips pointed out in these pages on April 14, Leo “has chosen to ignore totally the deliberate and mass shedding of innocent blood by the Iranian regime, which earlier this year murdered around 40,000 innocent protesters and has spent the last 47 years waging war on America and the West through murderous terrorist atrocities”.
For her part, Ali made the point that “Pope Leo has been conspicuously silent about the systematic persecution of Christians at the hands of Muslims in majority-Muslim countries”. And added that Pope Francis did not explicitly condemn Hamas for its murderous attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
Jesus Christ declared that his kingdom was not of this world. But Christian leaders have rarely followed such a teaching. So, when a pope declares that a president has initiated an unjust war, it stands to reason that there is likely to be a secular response. From the White House and elsewhere.

But he did initiate a pointless, farcical, cruel war, from which he's since been desperately trying to escape, and all but the lunatics at News Corp would recognise it and call it out ...

Whatever happened to the notion of liberating the Iranian people? So much festering dung in the minds of these reptiles.

In short, strange days indeed, and strange company for the likes of Our Henry and Polonius to be keeping, but the pond always knew they had a good deal of war mongering and killing fields in them, and so they are just staying true to their nature ...

And so what really happened on that Melbourne EV trip.

Well it took about 11 hours. Left at 6 am and arrived at 5 pm. The pond could have cheated and said it saw the "welcome to Melbourne" sign at 4.30 pm, but the pond added  a little time to reach the now long gone Loaded Dog pub building, near where the pond once lived. 

Of course you could spend more hours getting to bits of Melbourne, which has now sprawled out everywhere, but current home to old Melbourne home seemed like a reasonable measure.

That compares to the early gas guzzling days when the pond did it in 10 hours, but in later gas guzzling days, what with Goulburn cops, Victorian speed cameras and the need for sensible breaks, the pond took about ... 11 hours. 

It so happens that EV breaks and sensible breaks sort of match up, and the time spent waiting to access an EV charger amounted to ... NIL. 

Of course charging takes longer than guzzling gas, but it makes for good breaks.

At Yass, there wasn't another EV in sight at the charger. The pond did a tour of the main drag, which is hurting badly because the Woollies/Aldi action is up the road - closed businesses, some for sale, a junk store taking up space, an evangelical church at the river end, and only a small K-hub as a mark of conventional retail. 

The pond had a coffee and a treat, and took a look at the restored theatre, which is littered with small shops, and also saw that Pastor Dave still hadn't got rid of his Easter decor.

At Wodonga, there were no EVs until an Islamic family turned up (leaving two other stands still empty) and they did indeed get out a prayer mat and perform their rituals while their indolent son looked on. The pond didn't take a snap - let them pray in peace - but did take a snap of the spot where they prayed.

At the mighty Wang, the pond had time to take in a message from the nearby church, and visit the Wangaratta Arts Centre for a relieving pee, and check out the entertainment on offer. 

It was a dull, tedious trip of the kind the Hume always offers - hence the need for breaks - relieved by a four part podcast about the Klu Klux Klan, which almost felt like readings from the lizard Oz.

And so to the pictorial record of the trip...

First up the desolate, alienated chargers at Yass, starved for company by the chargers up the road. The mighty Yass Soldiers club is in the b/g... (click on to enlarge)

Just time for a coffee and a check of the town, which has hit hard times and has just knocked down a grand old pub, while restoring the local theatre ...

To add insult to injury, the town had bunged on an EV do ...curses, missed it ...

And there really is a Pastor Dave at the river end of the main drag, replete with faux Easter rock scene, just visible through the reflections ...

While at the Wodonga chargers, the pond really did see an Islamic family get out the prayer mat, and set themselves up to do their thing where the white car is in this snap ...

 

It's not exactly an exciting location for anything, but after the ritual they did head off to the nearby servo for whatever, and so must be considered dinkum, because anybody wanting to buy servo junk at inflated prices is doing right by the reptiles' idea of the Oz way of life.

It was also an excellent demonstration that there are many ways to enjoy a charging break.

And for the brief top up at the mighty Wang, the pond did take in a mysterious church message and did visit the arts centre for a pee and for coming attractions in stunning "digitally orchestrated" format ...

In which it's all hands on the Catholic deck for the antiChrist, with the bromancer leading the way ...

 

First, a little housekeeping: the pond is heading down to Melbourne for a funeral and so will be off air for some time.

To get there, the pond will be driving by way of an EV down the Hume.

This is an incredibly dangerous, tedious and expensive business and so the pond will likely take some time to recover.

The pond has it on good authority that EVs cost between $60 and $150k - there's not a single car below that price point - and that Telsas can run to $150k, and so the pond has had to take out a huge loan just to be able to do the EV thing.

Second, EVs are notably unsuitable for going on extended trips. Think of them as toys running on clockwork, with the spring pretty useless and likely to give out at crucial times.

The pond also understands that such a lengthy trip might involve getting in a queue to get a charge, and that you can get stuck in the queue for five interminable hours!

As the pond will be doing three charges, it's likely that will add at least fifteen hours to the trip, meaning it probably can't be done in under a day, even by driving all day and night, and ditto the reverse leg will also waste more than a day.

Along the way, the pond will encounter baleful reminders of the complete uselessness of renewables - there are the whale-killing windmills down Goulburn way (how the beefy boofhead failed in his mission!) and the solar arrays roadside in rural Victoria. 

Pray for the pond in best King Donald style, and ruminate on what the world lost when tungsten light bulbs were cruelly tossed aside.

So sadly the rest of this week will be lost, and that means that this week's Our Henry must be rescued from the intermittent archive by dedicated correspondents.

(See below for the pond's expert sources on EVs).

And so to the day's reptile news, and hallelujah, the reptiles have had a come to Jesus moment...

Now the pond only showed that full array of the "news" section to show what the reptiles really thought of the beefy boofhead's talk on immigration.

Instead of following up with a reptile jihad, ye ancient cats and dogs they preferred featuring the absolute freedom of superyachts.

This was a supreme tragedy for the pond because there had been a number of cartoons lined up to greet the beefy boofhead ...

What a terrible waste ... and there was even more wastage to come ...

Alas, all wasted, and it was no better over on the extreme far right, where the beefy boofhead simply couldn't get a run, and early in the morning the bromancer was top of the world, ma ...

The header: For Christ’s sake, Donald Trump, just don’t go there; The US President’s blasphemous social media posts showing himself as Christ have prompted even his Catholic supporters to demand an apology.

The caption? No need for a caption when confronted by a vision of Jesus Christ on earth.

The bromancer could only summon up three minutes of ranting, and his favourite descriptor "nuts".

Is this what FAFO sounds like, bromancer style?

It would be going too far, and surely over-theologising mere personal weirdness, to suggest Donald Trump should call on the services of an exorcist.
But you have to wonder what wicked spirits got into the President’s mind to have him make a personal attack on Pope Leo XIV, and post an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure in biblical clothing, with divine light emanating from his hand as he cures a sick person by laying his hand on his head.
Mr President. Are you nuts?
Trump seems to have a special rule. He bears no personal accountability for the frequently ridiculous and offensive things he says, but anyone who criticises him has committed a mortal sin.
Thus Trump threatens to bomb Iran back to the stone age, to “end” a civilisation, to attack desalination plants that provide drinking water for civilians, then gets upset that the Pope argues for peace instead of war.
Trump has every right to disagree with the Pope on international politics, or anything else, but personal attacks on Leo and blasphemous self-glorifying social media images are nearly deranged.
Those who think Trump is always more clever than his interlocutors, playing 4-D chess, must believe there’s a giant vote of extreme right-wing Christian nationalists who hate the Pope and regard Trump as godlike. However big that vote is, Trump’s sure got it sewn up now.
I’m not sure it’s an election winning cohort.
It’s also the case, incidentally, that Leo, the first pope from the US, is no crypto-communist. When he lived in Chicago, Leo voted in Republican primaries. He has praised the NATO alliance, showing he’s not some lefty who demonises soldiers. He has also said nations have a right to secure borders, to decide who comes into their countries, but that they should treat all people with dignity and care.

The reptiles didn't provide any relief from the rant by way of stills so the pond decided to help out ...

The pond has rarely seen the bromancer so gloomy for such a prolonged stretch ...

What on earth would you expect the Pope to say? Leo is a thoughtful, cautious, sensible, prayerful Pope. Trump seems unable to understand, or even recognise, such a figure.
To descend to mere politics, these latest moves are self-destructive for Trump and Republicans.
Trump has always been a mixed grill. He does and says some good things which other presidents would not be bold enough to do. He also does and says some nearly insane things. And even when he does something defensible, he’s inclined to wreck it with hubris, spite and madness.
His supporters wildly overstate his political strength. Unlike George W. Bush, Trump never won a majority of the popular vote in a US election. At the last election, he won a majority of US Catholics. They are diverse, of course, but most are swing voters because while they tend to be patriotic and moderately socially conservative, they remember their recent working-class roots, they are universal rather than racial in their human outlook and have some concern for social justice and ethical standards.
Trump therefore presents to them the same contradictions as he does to other voters. Trump lost the Catholic vote to Joe Biden in 2020, but won it, fairly narrowly, against Kamala Harris, partly because Biden was such a bad president.
Catholics have not really bought on to the idea, popular in some fairly extreme evangelical circles, that Trump is somehow a specially chosen instrument of divine providence.
A majority of US Catholics now disapprove of Trump and recent incidents will make that much worse. Republicans are likely to suffer in the mid-term elections as a result.
Trump has mobilised even those mainstream figures who have striven to see the good in his administration into straightforward denunciation of him. On social media, he’s like an excited kid lacking parental supervision. He’s badly missing the adults of his first administration.
No mainstream European leader has striven harder to see the good in Trump than Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, yet she condemned his attack.

It was as if something had snapped ... as if he'd done a Melania ...

The bromancer even played the Orbán card, though the reptiles resolutely refused to deploy the acute accent over the á:

Even conservative American Catholics have now denounced Trump. Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire internet ministry, is the most popular Catholic churchman in America, who serves on Trump’s religious liberty commission and has taken flak for supporting him on some issues. He too condemned Trump’s remarks and called on him to apologise to the Pope. This is a very widespread reaction among those Christians who have tried hard to identify with the good in the Trump program.
It’s now damaging to any political figure to have been Trump’s friend. His Vice-President, JD Vance, was in Hungary, wholly inappropriately, campaigning for Trump’s friend Viktor Orban, just before the election.
John O’Sullivan, the shrewdest of analysts, thinks this was a factor in the anti-Orban landslide that ensued.
If this is 4-D chess, Trump should go back to checkers.
And start his nightly prayers with an act of contrition.

Checkers? The cheeky bromancer has taken to bearding the emperor with wit?

And yet the hapless bromancer still thinks that King Donald might be up for an act of contrition, might know how to say a Hail Mary, the Apostle's creed, an Our Father, and a Glory Be, while clutching at his rosary beads?

At least the bro's still delusional ...

What was once the Australian Daily Catholic Times (before becoming the Australian Daily Zionist News and cheering on bigly ethnic cleansing) was so alarmed that it wheeled out a tyke to wonder if it was all the Pope's fault. 

Unlike King Donald, a master of subtlety and nuance, the clunky Pope might well have sounded like an oafish boofhead:

The header: Pope v Trump reveals the complexity of ‘just war’ in our troubled times; Should Pope Leo have been more nuanced in his language on war?

The caption: Pope Leo XIV attends a meeting with the Algerian community in the Basilica of Our Lady of Africa, in Algiers on Monday. Picture: AFP

Now for that rap over the knuckles for that insensitive Pope addling his response to that extremely sensitive mad King Donald:

Given what has been reported in the media, there is an extra sentence that I would like Pope Leo to have added to his comments on the war in Iran: that he was “addressing all relevant political decision-makers”.
It is easy to see why, without this qualification, he seemed to be referring only to DonaldTrump, given that this war was the US President’s initiative.
Trump’s reactions have been predictably outrageous, though his AI-generated image as a healing religious figure exceeds even his own narcissistic standards.
But perhaps Pope Leo really was singling Trump out for special condemnation? Some commentators have asked why Leo has not likewise criticised leaders of Iran or Hezbollah. Leo has explained that his task is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, which commands us to be peacemakers.

It's outrageous that this wretched Pope should single out mad King Donald. What on earth was he thinking? Didn't he realise that the mad king was the recipient of the inaugural FIFA peace prize, and blessed are the cheesemakers?

And remember, this is a just war...

As an earlier pope, John Paul II, said: “War is always a failure of humanity” – a failure to resolve conflicts in a way that respects the life and dignity of all affected. Nonetheless, defensive wars are sometimes a legitimate, necessary evil, even if the failure is chiefly on one side. Leo would not deny this; he is not a pacifist.

The reptiles reminded us of the humble king by turning to a snap:

US President Donald Trump speaks to the press outside the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, on Monday. Picture: AFP

As for all that bloody peace business, why are the bloody popes always yammering on about peace when they should be applauding the likes of Vlad the Sociopath and Benji the greater Israel man in their quest for a piece of this and a piece of that:

It is true that several recent popes have been reluctant to apply traditional “just war” criteria and have sounded more and more pacifist. The criteria were developed centuries ago when wars were waged by standing armies on defined battlefields away from civilians. While the principle that non-combatants must not be directly harmed remains sacrosanct, it is not clear how just war criteria can be applied in contexts where an enemy uses human shields, installs weapons in hospitals and schools, and wages a grey war through terrorist proxies.
Perhaps it is the nature of contemporary warfare that has led popes to simply urge peacemaking in all circumstances.
In Leo’s words, war today is “senseless and inhuman violence” even if it is defensive.
Given the longstanding conduct of Iran and its proxies, it can be argued that Trump’s chosen war against Iran is in truth defensive. Many will dispute this, but a reasoned argument is needed in either case instead of the bald assertions on both sides.
But even if Trump’s war is defensive, there is always a further ethical question to be faced about strategy and means. On this point, those who defend Trump’s pre-emptive action must by now be having their doubts. Was there real­ly no other way of dealing with the Iran threat? Is the chosen and ever evolving strategy proportionate to the noble goal?

Here we must pause to contemplate the wretch himself: the Pope addresses Algerian authorities, members of the civil society, and diplomatic corps at the Djamaa el Djazair Conference Center in Algiers, on Monday. Picture: AP

So to a little more both siderist thinking and cluck clucking and tut-tutting in a way worthy of any pious prelate:

It is worth recalling John Paul II’s condemnation of the war in Iraq and his prediction about its consequences. Likewise, Leo’s longstanding warning that the Middle East faces an “irreparable abyss” has become all too prophetic. In truth, many nations share responsibility for what has occurred – for they have stood by and allowed the violence and instability of the region to fester.
For better or (probably ) worse, the US and Israel have intervened – and both the surrounding nations and other influential nations are discovering too late that they should have taken responsibility sooner. There is a “failure of humanity” in every direction.
Even when a war has a legitimate defensive goal and is pursued by effective and proportionate strategies, this should never be an occasion for religious triumphalism.
Unlike US “secretary for war” Peter Hegseth, a Christian should wage war with profound and humble regret about the loss of innocent life, the destruction of cities and the economic harm to millions more. There is nothing to celebrate here; there will be blood on our hands, and the inevitable post-traumatic stress disorder for those closely involved.
Of course, religious leaders are likely to be criticised whether they do or do not speak out against aggression. When the Dutch Catholic bishops publicly condemned Nazism in 1942 the Gestapo began a new round-up of Jews, especially those such as philosopher and Carmelite nun Edith Stein (and her still Jewish sister), who had become Christians. They died in Auschwitz. Subsequently, The Netherlands had one of the highest mortality rates for Jews in Western Europe.
This does not necessarily mean the bishops should have remained silent; it does highlight the complexity of prudential judgments during wartime.
Pope Leo’s words could be more nuanced, even though he cannot purport to offer an ethical evaluation of the many facets of the current conflict. He is reminding us of the higher Christian perspective within which to view our actions. We must never cease from pursuing peaceful resolutions through dialogue and recognition of our common humanity. And if we must go to war, it should not be with an arrogant confidence in God’s blessing; at best, we can but trust that the defensive actions we need to take will be justified in the circumstances, and that God will bring good out of the evil we do.

And just who was that wanker?

Gerald Gleeson is a deputy vice-chancellor at the Australian Catholic University. He is a former vicar-general of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney.

He would have served ably in the church in Spain in the times of Franco ...

Glory unto King Donald ... hosannah in the highest ...

And here the pond clapped out though the finest reptile minds were out and about on parade, not least Dame Slap ... but after those sermons it was a bit of a downer for the pond to see that Dame Slap was blathering about "Civilisation":

Federal judge: Civilisation relies on us; don’t let the show down
A lecture from Federal Court judge Ian Jackman shows why character, not identity, should be the focus of citizenship.
By Janet Albrechtsen

The pond personally supervised her placement in the intermittent archive and will only offer this teaser trailer ...as she attempted to do a little bit of Our Henry in her opening flourish:

Given that Dame Slap was borrowing from a judge, one of that despicable bunch that Dame Slap routinely reviles, there was a hint of stolen valour in the way that Dame Slap pillaged his words and recycled them to her own glory.

And spoiler alert, here's the closer, a true measure of the extent of the meaningless blather ...

Say that again:

"Not letting the show down".

I say, gadzooks, wot wot, old chaps, there'll always be an England, must take the Spittie out for an early morning lap ...

...and what a chance to run the pond's favourite primary school poem, running deep with the thoughts of empire, doing the right thing, and conforming to the rigid teachings of Dame Slap ...

Vitaï Lampada

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night —
Ten to make and the match to win —
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

The sand of the desert is sodden red, —
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; —
The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind —
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

Wouldn't want to let the show down by not playing the game. Provided the pond can serve by way of keyboard.

And that's about that.

The pond decided to send warrior Liz to the intermittent archive cornfield ...

Ditch the talk, the best defence is innovation
Anything other than the two existential threats in Australia’s defence conversation is pretty much noise.
By Elizabeth Buchanan

The intermittent archive is working this morning, so a teaser trailer is more than enough ...

Splendid stuff, demanding an end to idle, meaningless talk, by bursting into action ... by writing a column for the lizard Oz.

Why that must mean the pond is action central.

Ditto Martin ...

The NDIS was a promise – now it’s a broken market
I hardly recognise what the National Disability Insurance Scheme has become; today the NDIS is hardly meeting anyone’s expectations.
By Martin Laverty

The only thing the pond will note about Martin is that the reptiles unfortunately started his piece with a snap of him looking like a smirking Cheshire cat ...

And so as promised to the source of the ancient reptile EV lore with which the pond began the day.

The pond never watches Sky Noise down under (still no rebrand?) and so was startled when the pond's logarithms unearthed this clip.

It featured dazzling blonde Danica De Giorgio, who is so thick she makes a piece of 4 be 2 look like a toothpick ...

It was titled Sky News Is Still Lying About EVs and Batteries - Here's what they just said... and so it caught the pond's eye.

It came as no surprise that the reptiles lied on Sky Noise - they lie every day in the lizard Oz, and the dog botherer was also featured, so naturally there'd be lies, but even the pond wasn't prepared for this level of inanity.

The pond only mentions it for those opening precious few moments of Sky Noise down under drivel ...

And speaking of war criminals deserving a papal lashing...