In which Our Henry leads the Friday way, but there are any number of other losers and dropkicks refusing to pay company tax ...

Devotees of Air Crash Investigations, aka Mayday - the pond is one - will recall the strange case of Gameel Al-Batouti who flew EgyptAir Flight 990 into the ground while chanting "Tawkalt ala Allah" eleven times. 

It wasn't a conspiracy, and his motivations are still disputed, but the odds are strong he wasn't a jihadist. 

On the other hand, there's the matter of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, where it became clear over time that Russian-backed forces were responsible for the war crime, though Vlad the Sociopath's minions have never faced justice.

The pond generally tries to avoid rushes to judgements, common gossip and conspiracy theories that immediately erupt after an event. 

The mad mullahs of Iran have enough on their plate with the murders of thousands of dissidents, and knee-jerk reactions that they're behind everything needs time and evidence before being shouted, Benji-style, from the rooftops. 

This morning he'd retreated to talking about the pilot in the latest disaster as being "suicidal", infused with religious fanaticism, but his motivation is crudely obvious - he's got an election to win.

Naturally the Australian Daily Zionist News was all in ...

Luckily the intermittent archive is now working again so the pond could send that offering off to the cornfield: Radicalised Flydubai co-pilot ‘had discussed killing Jews,’ likely recruited in advance

Why everyone keeps quoting Benji, when his motivations are obvious, remains a mystery.

Besides, there's enough dismal news to hand with yet another example of the enormous cruelty and fatuous logic behind lethal injections as a punishment, as well as the odd bit of joy, as in the speculation - fuelled by gambling - that Mark Carney might score the Nobel Peace Prize and Time Person of the Year.

The pond would love it to happen, simply to make the mad King even madder, but won't be putting any money on it, just as the pond is a glutton for stories about the imminent fall of Vlad the sociopath, though he's been taking a very long time fall.

In the interim, there are simple pleasures like the folly of Eric Schmitt, whose name resonates with excremental behaviour.

The one thing that the pond can rely on each Friday is that Our Homeric Henry will turn up with yet another diatribe, littered with pompous, portentous references, and thereby provide a form of cosmic relief. 

And so it came to pass this day ...and what a great day, because it's not the usual rampant Zionism, for which the pond had laid the groundwork yesterday, but rather "identity politics", confused and conflated with AI ...

The header: By Henry Ergas

French author’s AI scandal reveals how identity politics is degrading literature

The invitation to listen to a bot imitate Our Henry, shades of irony: Listen to this article

8 min

The caption for the plain Jane illustration: Copies of the book C'etait ca ou mourir (It Was That or Die), written by Canadian-Haitian novelist Thelyson Orelien, at a literature festival in France. Picture: Joel Saget/AFP

The plea for relevance in a world where paywalls breed irrelevance: Make us preferred on Google

Our Henry went right off, in a most satisfying way ...

Last week, France’s rentrée littéraire – the late-summer publishing season that marks the end of the summer holidays – veered from triumph to scandal. Thélyson Orélien’s C’était ça ou mourir (“It was This or Death”) had taken bookshops by storm and, after winning the FNAC readers’ and booksellers’ prize, appeared on the longlists for just about every major literary award – including the Goncourt, the most prestigious of them all.

Orélien, a Haitian-born writer now living in Quebec, tells the story of a history teacher from Port-au-Prince who is forced out of Haiti when his neighbourhood burns, taking only a diploma, a notebook of poems and a photo of his mother. After a harrowing escape he travels, always at great risk, through the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Mexico toward family in Canada, before facing the blatantly racist hostility of US immigration officials as he approaches the Canadian border.

The caption for the alleged thought criminal: Canadian-Haitian novelist Thelyson Orelien Picture: Joel Saget/AFP

An autobiographical saga of dispossession, forced migration and the desperate search for asylum, the book received gushing reviews. Then, on September 21, just three days after Le Monde, the progressive literati’s bible, hailed its brilliance, an anonymous account on X claimed the novel had been largely written by artificial intelligence.

That conservative outlets seized on the post immediately sparked accusations of racism, with Orélien denouncing a racially motivated conspiracy. But as mounting evidence confirmed the post’s claim, and revelations emerged of plagiarism in Orélien’s earlier work, the book was dropped from the Goncourt longlist.

None of that dimmed the ardour of his supporters: sales have risen and bookshops have turned promotional events into rousing displays of solidarity. Nor have any of the other major literary prizes followed the Goncourt’s lead.

Startling as that is, it is a sign of the times. The literary world no longer honours authors; it consecrates saints. What is rewarded is not the writing but the political virtue of the writer – a writer who, when exposed as a fraud, is promoted to martyr rather than demoted to sinner.

Actually it's not just literature. See the aforementioned Schmitt and his devotees ...

Eric Schmitt’s Very Bad Day at Work

For MAGA politicians, there’s no such thing as a gaffe. (*intermittent archive link)

By Helen Lewis

...Some MAGA influencers fully embraced the idea that Schmitt had, in fact, completed le epic pwn of Smith. On The Charlie Kirk Show—still named for its late creator—one of the hosts played the clip of Schmitt’s question after telling the senator he had to “give you some flowers” for his acuity. The whole segment appeared to have been beamed in from a parallel reality where the exchange with Smith had gone well for the senator. “It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game going on at that time in Atlanta,” Schmitt said. “He claimed later that he was at another game. I don’t know. Now, here’s the thing—my job is to ask the questions.” This explanation opens up the possibility that the reason Schmitt and his team didn’t think Smith could be referring to the Hawkeyes was because they had forgotten the existence of women’s basketball. Not a great look for a party that has made a crusade lately of protecting women’s sports.

Other stars in the MAGA universe, however, seemed to realize that Schmitt’s failed gotcha would not delight their faithful, even if they could not say so out loud. The former journalist Benny Johnson, who has 4 million followers on X, posted that Schmitt had “pulled out the receipts” and left Smith “stunned.” Later, he deleted that post, without explanation. On Fox News, Sean Hannity’s recap of the hearing left out Schmitt’s screw-up but included a megamix of Republicans shouting at Smith, including John Kennedy of Louisiana telling the former special counsel that “you make me want to throw up in my mouth.”

Enough with the comedy, the pond has never been big on literary prizes. They're a useful way to flog a book, but have as much meaning as the honorific, "New York Times best seller".

Time is the only way to sort out books of lasting relevance - imagine Our Henry going off at Charles Dickens for being "woke" and full of identity politics as he scribbled about the miseries of Victorian life, yet in the pond's mind - having recently had another go at Vanity Fair - he's lasted better than Thackeray (on the other hand Thackeray's portrait of vanity has more than a hint of 'wokeness' and 'identity politics' about it).

Do such prizes need Homeric Henry wandering around with a blunderbuss, especially as he uses that prime doofus and epically stupid man Bret Stephens as a source? Not really ...

Literary prizes give that judgment its public seal: they hand out the halos to those whose identities are taken as credentials of merit. And in few countries is that clearer than in Australia.

We are, for sure, not alone. Bret Stephens recently noted that in the United States, nine of this year’s 10 National Book Award winners came from “minorities”. But the trend here is exceptionally stark.

From 2000 to 2008, 11 per cent of the writers shortlisted for our literary prizes were Indigenous or “culturally diverse”. Since 2018, that share has soared to 46 per cent. Over the same periods, “women of colour”, as Americans call them, rose from 5 per cent of those shortlisted to 31 per cent. Nor does the leg-up end with places on the shortlist: Indigenous authors, for example, now win at about twice their share of shortlisted books.

As authors’ identities have gained prominence in prize selection, so have identity-based themes among the winning books. In the 1990s, “identitarian” books accounted for no more than 10 per cent of prize winners. From 2000 to 2014, their share climbed into the 10-20 per cent range. Then the identity-themed share rose towards 30 per cent before surging to nearly 50 per cent.

That is not simply because authors who define themselves by their identity tend to write identity-based novels. Who judges them matters too: a five-member panel with two Indigenous or “culturally diverse” judges is statistically likely to shortlist twice as many novels with identity-based themes as a panel with none.

With those groups’ share of judges trebling, from 12 per cent in 2009-17 to 36 per cent over the following eight years, identity-themed works claimed a growing share of shortlist places – and a still greater share of winners.

But the effect doesn’t end with the verdict, because past winners have a strong chance of becoming future judges. The process therefore feeds on itself: the favoured groups win prizes, gain places on judging panels and select new winners in their image. Already represented on panels far above their share of the population or of Australia’s published fiction writers, they are likely to supply an increasing proportion of tomorrow’s winners, judges and then winners – expanding and entrenching identity literature’s dominance.

Far from stemming those trends, the government fuels them. The entity laughingly referred to as Creative Australia boasts that 13 per cent of its individual grant recipients are Indigenous, up from 7 per cent in 2015-19, as against a population share of just 3 per cent. “Minority applicants”, it reports, have a higher success rate on applications than those outside the favoured group – evidence it interprets as proof of success, rather than as a surefire way of discouraging outstanding applicants who do not fit its ideological straitjacket.

None of this troubles the pond, though it surely troubles bigots and rancid racists. 

Those who want to stick with the own kind and celebrate exterminations and apartheid always have Quad-rants, and the lizard Oz as home for their literary endeavours ...Arts Minister Tony Burke at the launch of Creative Australia in 2023. Picture: Creative Australia

Clearly the hole in bucket man got out of the wrong side of the bed and wanted something to rant about, and so inevitably ended up dragging in the Soviets...

Nor is the outcome politically neutral. Eight recent award winners received Creative Australia funding. Most are on the keffiyeh-clad hard left; all believe writing is a political task; none has enduring aesthetic merit.

That is hardly surprising. The books today’s panels select are almost invariably mediocre. They are not so hopeless as to entirely miss the mark; but they lack anything that makes a book truly unique – each is interchangeable with the next. The emotions we are intended to feel do not arise from a challenging encounter with the text. They are stuck on, announced as part of the package and supplied by a plot that demands no real work from the reader.

Many, moreover, are indifferently written inversions of Soviet-era Socialist Realism. In Socialist Realism, Andrei Sinyavsky observed in the 1965 book that brought him a seven-year sentence to the Gulag, “each work is assured of a happy ending”, for “even when it produces a tragedy, it is an Optimistic Tragedy, in which the hero may die but Communism triumphs”.

Actually Soviet Art has its recherché charms ... Seven decades of Soviet propaganda – in pictures

So sweet and aspirational.

Even the great Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich couldn't occasionally avoid reverting to the banalities that Stalinism required - think the 5th Symphony - but it's still a fun and rousing listen.

But when Our Henry gets on a drum roll, stand clear ...

Our authors don’t promise Communism’s happy endings. But their taxpayer-funded writing is no less formulaic, featuring protagonists who, like Orélien’s history teacher, compete in the victimhood Olympics, relentlessly battling “whiteness”, racism and, more recently, the evil of evils, Zionism.

This is, in short, a state-sponsored system that produces clones, not masterpieces. Two continental literary prizes that have resolutely bucked the “diversity” trend show what could have been: the Prix Goncourt and Italy’s Premio Strega. Since 2000, the Goncourt has rewarded at least eight genuinely outstanding books; the Strega, at least five. Apart from Tim Winton, whose most feted work predates 2000, and Christos Tsiolkas, it is hard to think of an Australian winner whose award-winning book will stand the test of time.

If the pond might be so bold, Tim Winton leaves it cold, but that's the joy of personal taste ...Australian author Tim Winton at Ningaloo, WA.

Xians of the Simon Smart kind are welcome to him ... The Sacred Fragility of Life: Tim Winton, Faith and Fundamentalism

In an age so dominated by a hard materialism Winton stands out as someone who believes the material aspects of life are bound up in the spiritual. Which means questions of justice have an eternal ring to them. He takes on the persona of the raging prophet in his Palm Sunday Speech ("Stones for Bread") that picks up on Jesus's Sermon on the Mount to castigate modern Australia for its treatment of asylum seekers. "Something is festering in the heart of our community, something shameful and rotten," he warns. "But to live as hostages to our lowest fears we must surrender things that are sacred: our human decency, our morality, our self-respect, our inner peace." Winton continues to have faith in our better instincts and it is to these that he appeals.

Is Our Henry remotely interested in that epic tale turned by Phil Noyce into Rabbit Proof Fence?

Probably not, that would be a step too far for the old bigot ...

But the damage does not end with the prizes. In the increasingly intense competition for attention, the likelihood of winning inevitably influences what is published. Life will therefore become ever harder for authors who buck the party line; far better to “sing in chorus”, as they used to say in the USSR.

The results are predictable. Identity fraud and political conformism will flourish as failing to tick the right boxes becomes a red flag. So will identity literature’s answer to chick-lit: post-colonial tales of suffering, struggle and survival “authored” by AI.

Perhaps that is the upside: at least the machines will be intelligent. And since we are determined to become an economic backwater, why not be an intellectual wasteland too?

No Zionism, no Thucydides? Ah well, as Ned is alleged to have said, and as Joseph Furphy once wrote, such is life.

There's enough of an intellectual wasteland at the lizard Oz to satisfy the pond for several lifetimes.

Have an immortal Rowe for a break...

And so to the difficult matter of picking a bonus.

The  reptiles' spoofing of the intermittent archive seem to have gone awry, so it's possible to do a survey of what's troubling the hive mind ...

Commentary

By Michael Easson

‘Strategic ambiguity’ on Taiwan satisfies our national interest

The war on China is best left to the bromancer ... and the bulk of the meretricious Merritt is best off in an archival cornfield:

Legal Affairs

By Chris Merritt

Flawed laws and failing civics education expose Australia to rising post-October 7 hatred

Sure there's a requisite amount of Zionist flourishes.

Sure there are ironies to relish in the meretricious Merrit rabbiting on about "civics education" in a paper dedicated to division and hate and fear-mongering, but is that enough to justify going through the usual hysteria about furriners? Not to mention blather about "Australian values".

Consider this. The corporation for which Merritt works absolutely avoids paying tax, as good citizens should do.

The keen Keane scribbled News Corp celebrates more than a decade of paying zero tax in Australia for Crikey, which might involve a paywall:

Despite its pretensions to lecture Australia about its values and how it should be run, the Murdoch family’s News Corp really has nothing to do with Australia. It is a foreign company, and it serially pays no tax here, despite earning billions in revenue on our shores.

In 2024-25, according to the Australian Tax Office’s corporate tax data released today, News Australia Holdings — the official name of News Corp’s Australian subsidiary — racked up 10 years of paying precisely zero tax. For that year, it earned $1.89 billion in revenue, made more than $300 million in profit (a record for the past decade) and paid nothing in tax.

Indeed, there’s a peculiar steadiness to News Corp’s tax dodging. For the past four years, it has earned around $1.8 billion in revenue and paid no tax on around $300 million in profits in 2023-24 and 2024-25, and $200 million in profits in 2021-22 and 2022-23.

You can go all the way back to when the first corporate tax transparency data was released for 2014-15 — the result of a Rudd-Gillard government initiative (opposed by the Coalition) — and find News Corp’s main company has paid no tax across those years, on revenue of, in total, $23.9 billion and profits of $1.38 billion.

The only News Corp entities to pay tax in that time were an investment company, which paid $200,000 (sic) in 2017-18 on $291 million in profits, and a pay TV financing arm, which paid $8 million in 2015-16. Real estate listing oligopolist REA Group, which News Corp part-owns, paid $246 million in tax.

Otherwise, News Corp’s only contributions to Australia are social division and the fostering of hate and resentment.

In contrast, Nine Entertainment paid $76.7 million tax on $290 million in profits; ailing Stokes family company Seven West Media — since folded into ailing Southern Cross Media — managed $3 million on $11 million profits, based on $1.3 billion in revenue. Southern Cross paid $4 million on $14 million. Ten Network, as usual, made nothing and paid nothing.

The 2024-25 data — which, as the ATO is always eager to note, contains details of corporations that pay no tax for perfectly good and legal reasons — show that fossil fuel and energy companies dominate the ranks of those paying zero tax.

And remember that Faux Noise is behind one of the most incompetent and deeply corrupt regimes in the history of the United States...

The pond did think about giving AI another run ...

By Adam Slonim

Medicare breach presents a timely argument for control of our AI

But now that the intermittent archive is back, why bother? 

The pond should note it was deeply touched at the presence of a new Oz bot ...

... but that's as far as the pond's enthusiasm went, because the day the pond asks the reptiles about anything is the day their MAGA hero becomes a decent president, somewhere past the twelfth of never, a very long time ...

Instead the pond settled on the luddite lizard Oz editorialist's yearning for more coal...

To hell with the planet and to hell with taxes. 

Heap on more coal, me hearties... and have a hearty infallible Pope to help with the heaping ...

Desperate, the pond realised that there's always reheated Mein Gott to hand ...

Ways to fix the plight of suffering workers?

Gott it ...

Ways to avoid paying company tax? 

Perhaps blather endlessly about red tape?

Gott it ...

Ask the lizard Oz about ways to avoid paying tax while purporting to good citizenry and with a solution to everything? 

Gott it ...

The madness never seems to end ...

In which the pond prepares for a Friday encounter with Homeric Henry with a reading ...

 

The pond will be back on deck tomorrow - a failure to cover the latest Homeric Henry outing would be a disgrace of the first water.

The odds are high that he'll be in full Australian Daily Zionist News mode, as will be the reptiles generally, what with Benji seeking to make political capital out of the Flydubai flight FZ1073 matter, and an election rapidly approaching.

The pond woke to the Beeb trying to make sense of the chaos and confusion surrounding the affair aboard the aircraft, but it's too early to extract any firm understanding at a distance, much like the matter of the alleged grave threat to RAF Fairford, so grave that the alleged five miscreants were immediately given conditional bail, a result that perplexed both mad King Donald and the pond.

Whatever, for the moment, the pond will offer another reading, and speaking of "Western Values" - as the pond did yesterday, and not to be confused with bombing schools - this hovered into view as a result of the pond's free range reading.

Where Hatred Lies
Omer Bartov
A nuanced new history by Mark Mazower reminds us that antisemitism, an age-old threat to Jewish life, can be warped into a political tool—as we see today, when any criticism of Israel can be deemed antisemitic. (*intermittent archive link)

An earlier piece by Bartrov in the same journal gives an idea of where his sympathies lie ...

‘Infinite License’
Omer Bartov
The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met. (*intermittent archive link)

Bartov opened this piece with a reference and an historical flourish worthy of Homeric Henry:

On January 12, 1904, the Herero people of German Southwest Africa—today’s Namibia—launched a series of attacks on scattered German farms in the territory. The Herero, a pastoral group of about 80,000, depended on their vast cattle herds for their economic, social, and cultural life, but the German settlers who had begun to arrive in the late nineteenth century increasingly encroached on their grazing lands.
The rebels destroyed many of the farms and killed more than a hundred settlers, mostly sparing women and children. For the settlers the rebellion served as a final proof of the need to eradicate the Herero, whom they described as “baboons.” Unable to restore order, the German governor appealed to Berlin, which sent some 10,000 soldiers. By August they had crushed the Herero fighters. In October the German commander, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, issued what has come to be known as his Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order) to those who remained:

"The Herero are German subjects no longer. They have killed, stolen, cut off the ears and other parts of the body of wounded soldiers, and now are too cowardly to want to fight any longer…. The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the big cannon. Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children."

Most of the Herero were shot or died of thirst and hunger in the desert to which they had been expelled. Several thousand were taken to forced labor camps.
For many decades the public and historians alike ignored this first genocide of the twentieth century. Germany’s famous Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with or overcoming the past) was about the Holocaust, not long-forgotten colonial crimes. Only in 2021 did the German government officially apologize for “the suffering, inhumanity and pain inflicted on the tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children by Germany during the war in what is today Namibia.” It also pledged over a billion euros in reparations, although the distribution of this money remains contentious, not least because the Germans negotiated with the Namibian government rather than with the Herero themselves.
That remote genocide at the dawn of the twentieth century shares some remarkable similarities with the campaign of ethnic cleansing and annihilation prosecuted by Israel in Gaza. Israel saw the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, in much the same way that the Germans saw the Herero attack 119 years earlier: as confirmation that the militant group was utterly savage and barbaric, that resistance to Israeli occupation would always incline toward murder, and that Gaza’s Palestinian population as a whole should be removed from the moral universe of civilization. “Human animals must be treated as such,” the Israeli major general Ghassan Alian (who is Druze) said shortly after the attack, echoing several other Israeli officials, including former defense minister Yoav Gallant. “There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell,” Alian said in an Arabic-language video message directed to Hamas as well as the residents of Gaza. Over the next seventeen months Israeli forces killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, over 70 percent of whom are estimated to have been civilians, maimed well over 100,000, and imposed on the remaining population conditions of inhuman deprivation, suffering, and pain. A cease-fire that went into effect on January 19 ended abruptly on March 18, when Israel refused to move on to the second phase of its agreement with Hamas and launched a series of unilateral attacks that have already killed hundreds more Palestinian civilians.

And so on, but the pond didn't mean to distract from the "western values" at work in Bartov's second piece, with the book under review being:

On Antisemitism: A Word in History
by Mark Mazower Penguin Press, 333 pp., $29.00

Bartov went into a detailed discussion, prompted by Mazower, of the question of antisemitism and its confusion and conflation with Zionism:

...Since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, and the genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza that followed, the association between criticism of Israel and antisemitism has become ubiquitous. A growing range of scholars and other observers seem to agree with Mazower that even if “some anti-Zionism masks anti-Jewish sentiments, much of it does not.” But most major American Jewish organizations have stayed attached to the assumption that the main source of antisemitism in the world today is the anti-Israel left. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) contends that “anti-Zionism is antisemitic, in intent or effect.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) defines anti-Zionism as “inherently bigoted” and claims that, because its “end goal…is to undermine and eliminate Jewish rights,” the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is driven by “antisemitic motivations.”
Various factions of the political right, meanwhile, have been quick to turn these assumptions to their advantage. Some have used allegations of antisemitism as a cudgel against the left in order to, in Mazower’s words, “police the universities, end long-standing anti-discrimination and diversity initiatives, reassert ‘Western values,’ and reaffirm the role of religion in American life.” Others have conscripted anti-Zionist, pro-Palestine rhetoric into the service of a notion of “Western values” rooted explicitly in Christian nationalism, expressing suspicion and hostility toward American Jews rather than opportunistically claiming to protect them.

Bartov spends plenty of time observing the dynamics arising from the establishment and growth of the state of Israel, and the pond commends the read available by the link.

Crucially, he raises the question of the standards adopted by Australia regarding the definitions of antisemitism - a prelude to the findings of the Royal Commission in December - versus any commentary on the concept of Zionism, though only indirectly, because his commentary is directed at the United States.

There is, however, something of an analogy to hand for the hive mind approach down under:

...As Mazower shows, this transformation in the understanding of antisemitism was reflected in profound changes in American advocacy for Israel. Especially after the fall of communism, such organizations as the AJC and the ADL, alongside the newly established Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and the AJC-backed UN Watch, became increasingly engaged in “monitoring” anti-Israel bias and undertaking antisemitism research. In 2004 Congress passed the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, leading to the creation of the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism within the State Department. Because the definition of antisemitism now included “vilification of Israel,” Mazower explains, “American diplomats had an obligation to act on behalf of another nation.” Putting it differently, it also meant that antisemitism—defined as “vilification of Israel”—had become anti-American.
The best tool for the elimination of the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israel has become the definition of antisemitism endorsed in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organization created to promote education about the Holocaust. Of the definition’s eleven examples of potentially antisemitic actions or statements, seven refer directly to Israel. They include denying Jews the right to self-determination, applying double standards to Israel that are not demanded of other nations, accusing Israel of exaggerating the Holocaust, and drawing comparisons between Israeli policies and those of the Nazis.
Some may find these statements objectionable, but they are not in and of themselves antisemitic. Many Jews around the world have rejected Zionism for theological or ideological reasons; many supporters of Zionism have argued that Israel should be “a light unto the nations” and thus held to higher standards; and many critics of Zionism, including Israelis, have argued that Israel has politically instrumentalized the Holocaust and drawn their own comparisons between certain Israeli actions and those of the Nazis. That is why alternative definitions have been offered, such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document, which carefully distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of Israel.
Nonetheless, in May 2024 the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which requires the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to adopt the IHRA definition. A few days later, in a speech at a remembrance ceremony for victims of the Holocaust, President Joe Biden implicitly endorsed the analogy between protests against Israel’s brutal response to the attack by Hamas on October 7 and antisemitism. In January 2025 President Donald Trump issued an executive order called “Additional Measures to Counter Anti-Semitism,” which draws on another order he signed in 2019 that requires federal agencies to consider the IHRA definition of antisemitism when enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The new executive order demands that “all available and appropriate legal tools” be used “to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.” This has enabled greater federal scrutiny of universities for allegations of antisemitism on their campuses, and the threat of withholding federal funding to compel universities to adopt new policies. For all intents and purposes, allegations of antisemitism have become a new way to muzzle opinion, silence speech, and curb academic freedom. All of this has been described by Kenneth Stern, who was the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, as making it “more, not less, difficult to tackle both antisemitism and anti-Israel dogma.”

Well yes, and Bartov immediately follows with the nub of it ...

There are two obvious problems with conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The first is the peril of confusing antisemitic prejudice with political opinions in response to the reality of Israeli occupation, oppression, ethnic cleansing, and growing racism. Indeed, a good deal of protest against Israel’s actions might be seen as defending the very political values that antisemites have long sought to undermine. If we are to pay any heed to the International Court of Justice’s 2024 ruling that described the occupation of the West Bank as unlawful and noted that Israel’s practices violate the prohibition against racial segregation and apartheid, then we must conclude that criticism of the brand of Zionism implemented by the Israeli government today is not only warranted but necessary for enforcing international humanitarian law. Having once meant “the hostility faced by Jews as a minority struggling for their legal rights,” Mazower argues, now antisemitism is more often an allegation “used to defend a Jewish majority state depriving the minority within it of theirs.”
The second problem with an Israel-focused understanding of antisemitism is that it leads to a faulty account of the main sources of anti-Jewish hatred, historically and in the present. Scholars and commentators who conflate anti-Jewish prejudice with anti-Zionist sentiment often focus their attention on antisemitism on the political left and in the Arab and Muslim world. One can certainly find antisemitism everywhere, among socialists and communists as well as liberals and conservatives. Neither the political left nor the Muslim world, however, has in the past century offered a form of anti-Jewish prejudice anywhere near as coherent, influential, and dangerous as that of their right-wing counterparts.

The pond will leave the rest to Bartov, save only to note his conclusion:

...We have come full circle. Because the aim of today’s surging accusations of antisemitism is not to combat the actual phenomenon but to suppress anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel, the “new right” has been handed a convenient opening. They have seized it. They now imply, and in some cases outright assert, that the Jews are the source of the rot in American society. Ironically, by presenting protest against the indefensible as malign, the self-proclaimed guardians of the Jews have done more than just warp the meaning of antisemitism. They have made it into a tool for those eager to revive the century-old hoax that, in their unequivocal support for Israel, the Jewish state’s defenders, and by extension the Jews as a whole, have stabbed their homeland—this time America—in the back.

 BTW, Bartov is no knee jerk fellow traveller of any cause, as the tag for the article notes ...

Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown and the author, most recently, of Israel: What Went Wrong?

He is, in fact, impeccably Jewish, as his wiki explains ...

Omer Bartov was born in 1954 in Ein HaHoresh, Israel. His father, Hanoch Bartov, was an author and journalist whose parents immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Poland before Hanoch was born. Bartov's mother immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Buczacz, Poland (now Buchach, Ukraine), in the mid-1930s. Bartov's parents were Zionists and fought in the 1948 Palestine war.
Bartov fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a company commander. In 1976, he and a score of other soldiers were severely wounded in a training accident due to a commander's negligence, which Bartov says the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) covered up. Bartov was educated at Tel Aviv University and obtained a D.Phil. from St Antony's College, Oxford, with a doctoral thesis on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and its crimes on the Eastern front during World War II.

And so on, but as seen above, he has certain views ...

In January 2024, Bartov said that Israel had repeatedly expressed genocidal intent against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the Gaza war. By August of that year, having visited Israel again in June, Bartov said it "was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions". On April 24, 2025, Bartov said: "It's a misnomer to call it a 'war'. ... This is an occupation by the IDF designed to take over Gaza. There will, of course, be resistance, but it will be guerrilla resistance." He also noted the violence had escalated beyond Gaza to include the West Bank. In July 2025, Bartov wrote an essay in The New York Times in which he argued that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people and noted that other experts in genocide studies had reached the same conclusion. (All footnotes at his wiki)

This isn't a form of antisemitism, nor is it a case of Jewish self-loathing. 

Rather it is a matter of making observations arising from observable events, a feat which the Zionists at the lizard Oz are singularly incapable of doing.

What a relief it is to do a Tootle and leave the hive mind tracks to spend company with some insightful writing.

Meanwhile, the immortal Rowe and the infallible Pope keep the pond grounded and in touch with reality ...

Even the reptiles might be beguiled and compelled by that filmic comparison ...

Greetings from cocky land ...

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book under review ...

The West: The History of an Idea 

by Georgios Varouxakis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dorothy is unwell

 ... but hopefully back to normal soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well not all the evidence. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take it away simpleton Simon ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there you have it. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet me in the crowd

People, people

Throw your love around

Love me, love me

Take it into town

Happy, happy

Put it in the ground

Where the flowers grow

Shiny happy people holding hands

Shiny happy people holding hands

Shiny happy people laughing