Call the pond preverted if you like - many do - but the pond decided to skip past all the lizard Oz heavyweights doing the obvious this weekend, and instead mainline a good old fashioned serve of the Bjørn-again one.
These days it's a rarefied experience, with fewer and fewer publishing his thoughts, and more and more caring less and less, what with AI threatening to take out humanity (if a bot wanted to save the rest of the planet's creatures, that might be a fair dinkum strategy).
Do a quick search and those who are paying attention are growing ever more exotic and tragic ...
But the lizards of Oz maintain the faith, and the pond feels a deep nostalgia for the old days of the climate wars.
Who wouldn't marvel at the heroic stance of the Bjørn-again one, still valiantly fighting on after all these years (sssh, don't mention Nepal!)
The header: Burning truth about climate smoke and mirrors; Telling frightened people their houses burned because of fossil fuels is generating propaganda for costly policies and providing an alibi for failed fire protocols.
The caption for the snap: Beachgoers in July, nearby watched the blaze in the northern part of the Arcachon Basin in Gironde, southwest France.
Relax, that opening snap is just the reptiles indulging in a little disaster porn. Everything's fine and under control, trust the Bjørn-again one.
As a further bonus, the Bjørn-again one could only produce a three minute read distorting data, as a way of announcing in his sanguine way that everything's just hunky dory ...
More than 220,000 people fled the flames west of Bordeaux. Outside Madrid, fires scorched an area twice the size of the capital and drove nearly 90,000 people from their homes.
The people who lost homes and livelihoods deserve sympathy – and better fire policy.
What they do not need is the climate sermon that now follows every plume of smoke.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
The British and Spanish governments rushed out a joint statement declaring “climate change was now a national security emergency” threatening our way of life. The verdict was in even while houses burned: only ending fossil fuels could put out the flames.
Here is what makes this so exasperating: the planet is doing the opposite of burning.
Satellite data shows that as of September 2, the world’s burned area in 2026 is 40 per cent below the 2012-25 average for this point in the year – on track to becoming the quietest global fire season in a century. On current trends, 2026 could end up burning less than 1.5 per cent of global land area.
This would be vastly below the satellite record low in 2022 of 2.2 per cent and likely lower than any year since 1900.
Relax, it's fine, it's under control, the Bjørn-again one has the matter in hand, and must the pond say it again? Please, don't mention Nepal ...
Imagine the reverse. If global burned area were running 40 per cent above average, would anyone accept “but the Baltics are quiet this year” as a rebuttal? Of course not. Yet that is precisely the logic deployed in the other direction.
The climate lobby has seized on one data quirk; in the European fire surveillance, the satellite data for “Europe” includes the whole of Russia, including Siberia and all, so a quiet Russian year can flatten the continental numbers.
But strip Russia out entirely and by September 2 Europe without Russia has burned 22 per cent less than its 2012-25 average this year; nine of the past 14 years saw more fire by September 2.
France’s season is record-bad and Spain’s is severe. But two countries having a dreadful summer do not make a continental inferno, let alone a planetary one. Europe as a whole is having a below-average fire year.
The same pattern holds everywhere you look.
The reptiles seemed to undercut the message by offering an AV distraction featuring more disaster porn ... Wildfires have ravaged parts of British Columbia, Canada, prompting authorities to declare a state of emergency. A motorist captured footage of flames lighting up the night sky along Highway …
The Bjørn-again one held his nerve. No apocalypse here, here no apocalypse...
Africa, the most burned continent, is at an all-time low, 42 per cent below normal.
Oceania (mostly Australia) is 18 per cent below its usual burned area at this time and Asia has recorded its second-lowest burn in 2012-26.
Every continent is below normal, far below normal or setting records for how little is burning.
How is it possible that in a world burning less on every continent we believe that the entire planet is in unprecedented flames? Because the coverage tells us so. Infernos make the front page; record-quiet fire years make no news at all. Report only the fires and never the absence of fires, and the public will duly conclude the planet is ablaze – even as the data shows the opposite.
Relax, it's always been this way ...
None of this means France and Spain don’t have a real problem. They do: a record June heatwave dried out vegetation and decades of accumulated fuel created a monster.
Do nothing but that which has always been done ... remember the fearless advice of the mad king ... Trump blames California for wildfires, tells state ‘you gotta clean your floors’
“Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us,” he added.
The combination of assigning blame while fires still burn and offering questionable remedies have become as familiar to Californians as the conflagrations that ignite each year. Those fires have spurred a predictable response from the president: blame the Democrat-dominated state and then threaten to punish it by withholding money. He did so as fires burned in 2018, and again in 2019.
“I’ve been telling them this now for three years, but they don’t want to listen,” Trump said on Thursday. “‘The environment, the environment,’ but they have massive fires again.”
Wise words, and the Bjørn-again one heeds them ...
What will not help is the standard prescription of net zero. Even if the entire rich world hit net zero by 2050, at fantastical costs, the temperature difference by century’s end would be too small to measurably change fire risk.
Telling frightened people their houses burned because of fossil fuels – and that salvation lies in decades of expensive emissions cuts – is not compassion. It is generating propaganda for extremely costly policies while providing an alibi for failed fire policies.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of False Alarm and Best Things First.
Remember, do nothing, all is well, though perhaps you might invite AI into your home to help ...
But why did the pond go there first up?
What, you wanted the pond to go with Lachy, doing his bit for the Australian Daily Zionist News?
Bondi Terror remembers and honours all who were injured and lost, and the many heroes who stepped up when it mattered most.
By Lachlan Murdoch
The alternative headline? Insightful accounts bear witness to the horror of Bondi as it happened.
Insightful? Pass the pond a chuck bucket.
What was that all about? Flogging Sharri, full disrespect ...
This is an edited extract of a speech delivered by News Corp chairman Lachlan Murdoch at the launch of the book Bondi Terror by Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin at Bondi Pavilion in Sydney on Thursday night.
Enablers and amplifiers ...
And damned if the pond wanted to go down the 9/11 road with "Ned" ...
John Howard and George W. Bush: an alliance forged in the hour of need
John Howard’s decision to stand with the US on its darkest day reshaped Australia’s defence future.
By Paul Kelly
By Editor-At-Large
That image of an heroic shrub is unconscionable.
Note the sublime way that "Ned" skips over an uncomfortable truth ...
There was, however, a much bigger story – it is the adaptability, endurance and evolution of the ANZUS Treaty. Despite the US blunders, the alliance emerged stronger than ever. Indeed, the legacy of 9/11 delivered a transformation in the alliance from its 1951 origins with increasing advances over the years in US-Australian military interoperability – the culmination being the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine project for Australia, an idea inconceivable in 2001 yet only made possible by the 9/11 legacy in its deepening political trust across the oceans.
Howard told Inquirer: “The whole message is the remarkable adaptability of the alliance, the way it has endured for so long. I am sure it will continue to do so.” It is a declaration the alliance will prosper beyond the Trump presidency.
As for that war? It's a never no mind...
Howard’s loyalty to Bush was a domestic negative
Howard’s loyalty to Bush and his military decision on Iraq became a domestic negative, but not damaging enough to prevent his re-election in 2004 and, ultimately, not damaging enough to weaken the alliance. Iraq revealed Howard’s complexity as a politician.
He never became a pro-American romantic and his Iraq commitment was modest, calibrated and designed to minimise casualties – which it did. But the failure to locate any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – the ostensible justification for the invasion – became a devastating judgment on the entire venture, undermining its moral and strategic rationale.
That and the presence of the disgraced Pezzullo made the pond hasten to send the 11 minute sermon to the malfunctioning intermittent archive, lest the pond end up quoting Tucker ...
Your typical Fox News viewer is likely oblivious to this, but America’s response to 9/11 blew the original attack out of the water. George Bush’s subsequent war in Iraq, which made no sense considering Iraq did not do 9/11, got hundreds of thousands of innocents killed, had tens of thousands of American military casualties, and catalyzed the creation of ISIS. That means the U.S. slaughtered enough civilians to account for dozens and dozens of 9/11s. And that is a conservative estimate.
Oh the irony of Tucker berating typical Faux Noise viewers.
But then watching "Ned" trying to cope is almost as hard as listening to the mad King attempting to be solemn, while politicising a disaster in order justify another folly, his adventure in Iran.
And what to make of Gina's pampered pet's latest folly... Pauline Hanson’s goes personal on Anthony Albanese’s late mother.
Why go there, why dig that up? We know she's a terrible person, with not a shred of empathy to be found, just vitriol and bile ...
It turns out that it was yet another chance to spend half the piece rehashing Pauline's war with the pasty Hastie ...
That ended up sounding extremely woke ...
Liberal National MP Garth Hamilton said there was a “mean and distasteful element” to One Nation’s cartoons.
“The mocking of Senator Steele-John’s disabilities, using a man to voice Senator Wong’s character and the kernel of misogyny in the depictions of (Labor senator Charlotte) Walker,” he said.
“What kind of Prime Minister would she be?
“Fight on policy – not on personal issues like disability, sexuality or age.”
Time for a relieving immortal Rowe out on the links ...
For a bonus, the pond had no choice ... especially as the pond was inspired by a yarn in the Graudian ...
German media has revealed that among the 39 parliamentarians who will represent constituencies across Saxony-Anhalt in the state parliament, is a man alleged to have participated in pornography films and falsified academic qualifications; a former officer for the East German secret police, the Stasi; and several members under criminal investigation for their involvement in neo-Nazi organisations.
Two MPs are facing investigations into allegations they sought to continue the activities of the banned rightwing extremist organisation Artgemeinschaft, a neopagan group that has embraced nationalist and antisemitic ideas. The younger of the two is also alleged to have violated the law in relation to weapons, according to the public prosecutor’s office. Both reject the allegations.
The erstwhile pornography actor was convicted for stealing bedding in bulk from a hotel. A court confirmed he had been a pornography actor after he contested a local newspaper’s claims. He was expelled from a university after being found to have falsified his school leaving certificate, Die Zeit reported. The MP says he was readmitted after a legal challenge.
An ex-Stasi officer, aged 78, who won a direct mandate in his constituency, has admitted to having worked for the ministry for state security in the communist GDR, focused on East German citizens who wanted to permanently emigrate.
His role as an MP-elect has been criticised by campaign groups on behalf of victims of the former East German dictatorship.
Also, an investigation by the broadcaster ZDF revealed that some AfD ministers-elect who were also members of the previous parliamentary group, had ties to rightwing extremist groups. This included some having been members of the subsequently outlawed Homeland-Loyal German Youth group, HDJ. At one stage one of them had led the organisation, while an adviser to the AfD’s parliamentary group wrote a biography described as an “homage to national socialism”.
Among the prospective MPs are a number with pro-Kremlin links, as well as some who visited members of the Maga movement in Washington.
Asked to respond to the questionable biographies, in particular of the two MPs under criminal investigation, Siegmund, a former fragrance salesman who was unanimously re-elected as the AfD’s parliamentary group leader on Thursday, referred to the men in jest as “the bad guys” and said “we will await the results of the investigations and then discuss them”.
Just so, what a hoot, but that sounds like they might need a bit of spit and polish, a bit of shining up, a little cleansing and dusting.
Who better to do that than the bromancer, long an admirer of authoritarian figures?
The header: Can Germany’s far right clean up the mess Angela Merkel left behind? The AfD election result this week exemplifies the failures of Western politics.
The caption for the snap celebrating a man who looks great and possibly looks even better in a stylish black uniform: AfD state leader, Ulrich Siegmund – young and good-looking, master of memes and gimmicks, with no government experience – dominated the Saxony-Anhalt's state election campaign. Picture: Tobias Schwarz / AFP
Marvel as the bromancer spends a bigly nine minutes spinning out his infatuation with all things AfD.
His philosophical position sounds a tad similar to a German industrialist in the Weimar republic ... the man who dresses up in black and bashes unionists, commies and lefties is my friend. What could go wrong?
Go bromancing ...
Three giant policy failures have ruined German politics – mass immigration from the Middle East, net-zero energy commitments and overbearing European regulation. They were all caused, or greatly worsened, by Angela Merkel, chancellor from 2005 to 2021. Despite her electoral success, her record makes her the most destructive German leader since World War II.
The reptiles stacked the outing with visual treats ... International Relations expert Ralph Schoellhammer discusses former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who says she is heartbroken after the AfD’s historic win.
The bromancer was in his usual hysterical form. A result amongst a mob of East Germans heralded end times for lefties, centrists and whatever ...
AfD state leader Ulrich Siegmund, young and good-looking, master of memes and gimmicks, with no government experience, dominated the campaign. AfD was massively popular on social media (perhaps that’s why so many governments want to censor social media).
Chancellor Friedrich Merz, from the CDU, was thrown into immediate crisis. His 13 per cent approval rating makes him the most unpopular leader in modern Germany. Yet he won office just last year. The parallel with Britain’s Keir Starmer is stunning. Merz had promised to halve AfD’s vote and double the CDU’s. He got that back to front.
Crisis rolls on. On September 20 there will be regional elections in another small state, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and in Berlin. In Mecklenburg, the AfD is ahead with support in the mid-30s, while in Berlin polls just before the Saxony election had the CDU, AfD and Die Linke (the Left Party) all nearly even.
Quick, an image of him looking downcast ... German Chancellor and leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Friedrich Merz faces the media after state elections in Saxony-Anhalt. Picture: Getty Images
The bromancer was exultant ...
If AfD wins Mecklenburg and does well in Berlin, Merz is finished. The flood tide will be flowing.
If you're going to be an apologist for assorted fruit loops and loons, do it in style ...
There’s a strong case that AfD’s extremism has been exaggerated.
Watch as the bromancer gets wildly excited at the thought that neo-Nazis might not just take Germany, but Europe and the entire global thingie ...
The AfD result provides a crisis for Germany. It also has huge Europe-wide and global repercussions. It exemplifies the failures of Western politics generally, especially Europe’s. In Saxony, some 60 per cent voted for parties that want to end German support for Ukraine. But overwhelmingly they were voting on immigration and the economy, which ought to be a clue to deradicalising AfD.
In Germany, the centre cannot hold because the centre cannot govern. The European social, economic and political model has broken. It’s a social democratic model and social democracy is in existential crisis. The AfD’s success represents comprehensive failure for the two great parties of the post-war German success, the CDU and the SDP Social Democrats.
This is a humiliation for Germany, which rose from the ashes after World War II. It became the most successful big European state. The arc of German reputational resurrection after the war was long and mostly strong. First came the post-war West German economic miracle, under giants like Konrad Adenauer. Germany confronted morally the unspeakable evil of Nazism. It committed to democracy and civility, to the US alliance. It rebuilt its economy and society.
It was inevitable it would come ... ‘The moment of disaster on immigration came in 2015. Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Syrians, and then virtually to everyone from the Middle East.’ Picture: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Eek, the hordes, the hordes ... the invading, conquering, ruining hordes ...
Then came an advertisement for Nazi virtues ...
It recovered traditional strengths – precision engineering, industrial scale, civic orderliness – while rejecting traditional evils: militarism, decadence, ideological extremes.
As Adolf once said, would there have been a second world war without that war monger and ideological extremist Chamberlain? So much decadence, almost full Weimar republic.
And now here we are ...
West Germany oversaw peaceful reunification with communist East Germany under another giant, the CDU’s Helmut Kohl. When the euro was adopted as a common European currency in 1999, Germany realised fantastic economic benefit. Instead of the deutschmark being so overvalued as to render German industry uncompetitive, Germany enjoyed a permanently undervalued currency. The euro reflected southern Europe’s weakness, not Germany’s strength. In the early 2000s, the SDP’s Gerhard Schroeder introduced pro-market reforms to renovate the economy.
Cue a snap... Helmut Kohl in 2012. Picture: AFP
The bromancer generously allowed a few failings ...
By the time of the 2008 global financial crisis the rot had set in to German public policy. It became addicted to a prodigious welfare state. It ducked geo-strategic burdens its size should have mandated. It forgot hard lessons of self-reliance from after World War II. Its smug establishment, intimately involved in the European Union project, defined anything it didn’t like politically as being an echo of Hitlerism, thus ruling opponents out of the national debate.
The old German political model had been that the CDU and its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union, were as conservative as possible, in part to make sure nothing significant emerged to their right. Merkel did the reverse. She labelled everything to the right of the CDU unacceptable, undemocratic, quasi-Nazi, then moved the CDU relentlessly left. She created the modern German crisis.
Is Caleb still a thing? Apparently ... News24 host Caleb Bond says Germany’s migration backlash which has fuelled an AfD surge “lies at the foot” of former chancellor Angela Merkel.
In the verbatim record, two words were uttered repeatedly: “density” and “saturation.” The European countries were already beset with population “density” and had reached a point of “saturation” — in other words, there was simply no more room at the European inn.
It was an absurd thing to say, of course, in 1938, given the size of Europe’s populations today. And it would be an equally ridiculous thing to say now, too.
To be sure, the participants in Evian could not have foreseen the Holocaust, or that Europe was being drawn into another devastating war; nonetheless, their lack of moral conscience was breathtaking. Many of the countries that refused to take in suffering refugees were themselves, in due course, occupied and brutalized by the Nazis — and desperate for the compassion that they denied the Jews in July 1938.
The Nazis must have reveled in the knowledge that their virulent anti-Semitism found an echo — sometimes not so faint — in the rest of Europe. They also came to realize that if expulsion was not possible, extermination eventually would be.
Today, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism, xenophobia and anti-migrant sentiment are again rising across Europe, and we must stop now and reassess precisely where we are. A major British tabloid newspaper recently felt it acceptable to allow one of its columnists to liken immigrants to cockroaches. Rwanda’s Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines used the same word to describe Tutsis in the run-up to the 1994 genocide, as did Julius Streicher’s Nazi newspaper Der Stuermer to describe Jews. Political leaders across Europe regularly — and shamefully — blame migrants for their national woes.
Take it away bromancer ...
Merkel, and Germany, initially won a wave of international admiration. Germans liked this at first. They hated what followed. Perhaps 1.5 million people from the Middle East came into Germany as a result of Merkel’s actions. Within a couple of years it was seen as disastrous and Berlin reversed. But once you turn on a tap like that, it’s almost impossible to shut it off.
Nothing better illustrates the awfulness of a conservative turning left to win the plaudits of the zeitgeist. Before Merkel’s blunder, Germany had eight million foreign-born residents. The year after Merkel left office in 2021, the number was nearly 14 million. Much of that increase consisted of people who didn’t speak German and had little education.
There was a series of terrible Islamist terror attacks in Germany. The refugee assessment system has a bureaucratic bias in favour of accepting refugee claims, because almost no one leaves as a result of a negative decision. In 2024 Germany deported 22,000 people while more than 220,000 who had been ordered to leave simply stayed.
Immigrant crime is a grim reality. Press reports indicate that the government counted 751 gang rapes last year. In more than half of cases the suspects were not German citizens.
Because in the wake of its Nazi past there is an understandable hypersensitivity about race in Germany, it was until recently taboo to discuss any of this directly.
Don't expect such reticence from the bromancer when he dons his jackboots ... Right-wing activists gather in front of Hauptbahnhof railway station under the banner ‘We for Berlin – We for Germany’ to protest against Merkel's refugee policy in 2016. Picture: Getty Images
And so on with the nuking of furriners, and just nuking the planet, because why not?
The morality of immigration policy is much more complex than the broad left allows. Pope Leo XIV is a champion of immigrants, yet he acknowledges explicitly that nations have a right to control their borders. Merkel abandoned border control.
This huge unassimilated population has had major economic and social consequences for Germany. From 2015 its results in international school testing have been in radical decline. Australians were rightly shocked at how badly Australian students scored in the recent Program for International Student Assessment, PISA. Germany, once renowned for its education, scores well below Australia in reading, maths and science.
Merkel’s second great mistake was her embrace of net zero and the nearly insane decision, as early as 2011, to shut down the nuclear power industry (phase-out didn’t begin until 2021). Nuclear once supplied 14 per cent of Germany’s energy. Because of net-zero madness and the cessation of cheap Russian gas, Germans now pay twice as much as Americans for energy, and the highest prices in Europe.
The ultra-high energy costs and the ever expanding welfare budget have seen Germany deindustrialise, with hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs lost. Germany has had virtually no economic growth this decade. Industrial production is below its 2019 level.
EU regulation makes it difficult for any German government to reverse course on disastrous policies. This mess has seen AfD support soar. But don’t panic. This is not 1933. The AfD is not the Nazi Party. The AfD’s federal parliamentary leader, Alice Weidel, a lesbian, economist and former Goldman Sachs executive whose domestic partner is Sri Lankan, is no Adolf Hitler.
A final mistake of Merkel’s was her determination to demonise AfD at every point. A German intelligence agency has determined that AfD in Saxony, where 44 per cent of people just voted for it, is an “extremist right-wing organisation”. AfD furiously contests this and the ruling has been suspended while it’s challenged in court.
Why has the bromancer selected the AfD for two major outings in a week? There's a siren song there, a surging sympathy, a need to revive people wagons ... Germany’s manufacturing output is down about 10 per cent, with thousands of jobs being shed each month. Picture: Getty Images
It's all the fault of leftists, and anyway, these nice chaps have been vilified and demonised, and where's the justice in that?
The German people plainly resent this arrogance by the political establishment in telling them who they may not vote for. The AfD now leads national polls with 30 per cent support. Yet its election victory in Saxony provoked tens of thousands of left-wing demonstrators. It’s the left, much more than AfD, that threatens democracy.
Oops, perhaps he recognised he was going too far, because the bromancer hastily slipped in a minor billy goat butt ...
Don’t get me wrong. AfD is a very mixed grill and has some unsavoury aspects. There are a number of former neo-Nazis in its ranks. Perhaps the worst element is its pro-Russian outlook.
Don't get alarmed, a bromancer billy goat butt is always followed by the right sort of but ...
It wants to deport everybody in Germany who is there illegally. As Donald Trump is finding, mass deportations are very hard to bring about. This will be doubly so for Germany as many of its illegals come from countries that won’t take them back. But wishing to deport people who are in your country illegally is not Nazi, nor even extreme. AfD also talks confusingly of “remigration”, which means encouraging migrants who live on welfare to go back to their countries of origin. AfD leaders are clear that they have in mind only legal means, perhaps even some positive inducements such as grants. It may be wildly unrealistic, it’s not Nazi. If AfD tried to deport people who were German citizens (which it says it won’t do) this would be prevented by the courts and other political parties.
Thank heavens there's a lesbian, so it must be okay, at least if you follow the Bari model ... The AfD’s federal parliamentary leader, Alice Weidel, a lesbian, economist and former Goldman Sachs executive whose domestic partner is Sri Lankan, is no Adolf Hitler. Picture: Michele Tantussi/Getty Images
On with more common sense, because if it's on the far right, it's common sense to the bro ...
The pro-Russian stuff means it would be difficult to trust AfD with sensitive intelligence. A more sophisticated German mainstream would be able to wean AfD off its pro-Russian orientation. This is not core business for most AfD voters. AfD wants to enable home schooling and cut back leftist ideology in school and university education. It’s also Eurosceptic.
Merz himself didn’t really believe in the firewall policy, though in his desperation to survive he champions it now. In 2025 Merz put a migration crackdown motion to the Bundestag, the German parliament. AfD supported it and it passed, with their votes, 348 to 345. Merkel from retirement immediately denounced Merz for this heresy. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets. The SDP told Merz he was opening the gates to hell.
This rhetorical madness is common in Western politics. The left demonises its most dangerous opponents with excessive language. (Malcolm Fraser, before he became a lefty, was once as prime minister portrayed by the Australian left as an incipient dictator.) Certainly the left calls every populist party racist, fascist or Nazi. They rob language of meaning and thereby demean political culture.
There’s another way of looking at the rise of European populists, even of Trump and Pauline Hanson. Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Marine LePen in France emerged out of formerly extremist parties but are now thoroughly respectable conservative democrats who favour restricted immigration. Nigel Farage never was extremist. The rise of populists, while indicating failure by mainstream politics, is actually democracy working.
The bro really is more than authoritarian curious, more than far right friendly, he wants to be all in ... German federal police check cars arriving at the German-Polish border in September, 2024. Picture: Getty Images
Parteigenosse, the pond trusts you're leaving the bromancer more aware, more vital, more inclined to protect your precious bodily fluids from vile furriners ...
Democracies sometimes have to change, like Labour replacing the British Liberal Party a century ago. Populists attract some eccentrics, nut cases, chancers and ratbags. But as they get more credible they attract more competent folks too. Look at Mike Newman, One Nation’s NSW leader. It is undemocratic and dangerous to try to outlaw populists or to censor the internet so populists can’t get their message out. As Trump shows, the more you prosecute populists, the more likely they are to get elected.
The AfD’s victory in Saxony shattered German politics. But guess what? German politics deserved to be shattered. The contest for Germany’s future is joined in earnest. So long as it’s conducted through the ballot box, that’s no bad thing.
Much as it was a good thing that Herr Adolf did well at the ballot box ...
At this point, the pond supposes even the most diligent correspondent might be exhausted, but the pond wants to offer a bonus to the bonus, the sight of Gerard having a nervous breakdown in The Times ...
The more Gerard plunged into hysteria and end of world syndrome, the more cheerful the pond felt ...
All that and more, but in the end we're all dead ...
Of course the pond is absolutely terrified ... the pond is half-expecting the bromancer to go full Springtime in Germany ...
But there are upsides ...
... and there are slides, and who said the Titanic couldn't be fun?
