In which Dame Groan saves the penultimate post day by arriving to gas the country, and gas the planet ...

 

This is the penultimate post by the pond before going dark for an indeterminate amount of time.

It's not so much the physical move, which will happen in a day, but getting computers back up, reconnecting to the intertubes and sorting through an enormous amount of junk.

It would be nice if, in these last few days, the reptiles managed to publish something compelling, something that sustained interest in the pond in the dark times, but that's just a measure of the pond's delusional devotion to herpetology studies.

Instead say, any commentary on Ukraine being sold down the river, there's just a bog standard continuation of the endless war on Jimbo, with these yarns briefly at the top of the digital rag...

STATE PUSHBACK
NSW to waive stamp duty as Chalmers charges ahead on trust changes
NSW has become the first state to rule out individuals and businesses being hit with stamp duty should they restructure their trust arrangements following federal Labor’s reforms.
By Sarah Ison, Lachlan Leeming and Julie-anne Sprague

They needed three reptiles to put together that sorry tale? More talk of the suffering of the trusty rich?

This is the way that endlessly rippling waves and water wear down coastlines and rocks.

Only two reptiles were needed to help in the next phase of the agitated jihad ...

ALP AGITATION
Sting in PM’s tale as Albanese walks away from boast
Anthony Albanese has walked back his claim of personally reversing the ATO credit card ban as Labor MPs say internal morale has hit a new low.
By Greg Brown and Rosie Lewis

Geoff chambered a bog standard round ...

Dr Jim’s record falling flat in treasurer match-ups
The fact that the Prime Minister has been forced to step in and clean up Chalmers’ mess on several occasions is a bad look for the Treasurer.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Over on the extreme far right, Jack the Insider joined the chanting children in this version of Lord of the Flies ...

Past is past, Dr Jim … it’s your future I’d be worried about
Chalmers should forget about nostalgia, otherwise we might wistfully recall a time when giants of Australian political history really strolled the corridors of power.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist 

It's the repetition of visual images as part of the jihad that introduces a certain visual numbness ... with Jack recycling a lizard Oz favourite.

Talk about an inexhaustible ability to recycle old hits ...

And Geoff's piece was also a reminder of past visual glories...

It's the sheer inane repetition, the mindless ongoing sloganeering that means the rag is a propaganda sheet of the lowest and basest kind, that some days gets to the pond.

But why worry about images?

Well think of the alternatives.

it's Thursday, and that's petulant Peta day, and she was on a crusade worthy of a medieval Xian king ...

Taxpayers deserve answers over ALP grants to Islamic groups
The notion that taxpayers are left funding any individual or organisation connected with radical Islam should see urgent and immediate action.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

The pond absolutely refuses to indulge this sort of crusade - there's always the archive for Peta cultists - but as a counterpoint might note an alternative in another place ...

Brethren a controlling sect, not a religion, former and current members say
Lindy Jacomb was a naive 20-year-old member of the Exclusive Brethren, living at home with her family, when spiritual curiosity got the better of her. So she wrote to her church’s global leader and other elders. (*intermittent archive link)
Michael Bachelard and Sherryn Groch

Here's the nub of that piece ...

...On Friday, the electoral matters committee will ask hard questions of Hales – unprecedented for a man who for decades has answered only the inquiries of his own acolytes. He tried to get out of the grilling but failed.
At stake is not just his church’s reputation, but millions of dollars in tax exemptions.
Charities in Australia are prohibited from campaigning for political parties, and Hales’ church runs a dozen charities with hundreds of millions in assets. Research in the UK reveals the Brethren use these riches almost entirely for their own benefit. A finding that the church was involved in electioneering could seriously imperil these generous concessions.
A number of right-wing groups have leapt to Hales’ defence. Holding him to account is a threat to religious freedom, they say.
Turning Point USA, the controversial US right-wing organisation, called on the Trump government to lobby Australia over Hales’ questioning, with pastor Lucas Miles worried that, “If this approach succeeds against one church, it becomes a precedent of intimidation for all”.
The Coalition members of the committee have labelled Hales’ grilling a “witch-hunt”. The Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Michael Stead, and his organisation, Freedom for Faith, say the Brethren is a simple “mainstream Christian denomination,” whose members “have as much right as any other Australian to participate in the electoral process”.
“Religious leaders (are not) automatically responsible for the political choices, associations or conduct” of their members, Freedom for Faith told members of the committee in an email. (Neither they nor the Coalition responded to recent questions about Hales’ long history of antisemitic comments.)
Experts who know the Brethren better say these defences are wrong-headed. Reverend Tim Costello, a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity and former president of the Baptist Union of Australia, said Hales’ church “regard the rest of us Christians as so unfaithful that they will not worship, fellowship or even eat or drink with us.
“And the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren break up families … this is not freedom of conscience or freedom of religion.”

And so on, and the chance of reading anything like that in the lizard Oz? 

Between zilch, zero and zip ... (and yet any sensible atheist might wonder why all these churches get endless tax breaks and government indulgences)

What you get in the lizard Oz is endless hate, fear, division and loathing ... and the need for shadows to get on board the fake ranga agenda ...

Here's another piece the pond wouldn't touch with a barge pole ...

Labor’s ‘digital duty of care’ amounts to radical state censorship
Labor’s legislation is the most radical mass-censorship legislation any Western government has proposed in the internet era.
By Michael Shellenberger

That's the same loon that the pond recently noted was a charlatan, and yet he has the cheek, in the time of mad king Donald and tech bro billionaires, to blather about "western civilisation"...

...beneath these political and strategic motivations is a deeper intolerance towards different points of view. The left since 2010 went from demanding the cancellation of controversial speakers, to government censorship, to the celebration of the killing of Charlie Kirk for the things he said. This intolerance stems from the left’s dogmatic certainty that it is right and moral and its opponents wrong and immoral.
Western civilisation rests upon the idea that the truth emerges from dialogue and thus that free speech is the enabling foundation for democracy. The West’s first great martyr was Socrates, whom the government ordered to death for the things he said.
The Albanese government’s demand for censorship and the ability to wage informational warfare through the use of fake accounts is an attack on this Western tradition of free speech and democracy. I encourage the people of Australia to use their voices forcefully to oppose it.
Michael Shellenberger is the CBR chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin, the founder of Public.News, and the president of Civilization Works. He was a guest of the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia.

Yet another reminder, per his wiki ...

...Shellenberger has faced accusations of "bad science" for his comments on climate change in Apocalpyse Never; he has also been criticized for arguing with prominent climate scientists on social media and "apologising" to the world on the behalf of environmentalists.
A panel of scientists organized by Climate Feedback analyzed the claims he made in his "apology" article, concluding that they were "inaccurate or mislead readers by contradicting available evidence or using scientific data out of context." A Snopes article, which consulted multiple scientists that Shellenberger had cited, was similarly critical; Michael Mann called one of Shellenberger's central arguments "completely wrong," and found it was also contradicted by the very IEA source Shellenberger used to support it.  

He's also in the grip of a demented form of transphobia and can be relied upon for endless blather about "woke" ...

The pond doesn't want to get in the way of its final post tomorrow featuring Little Marco, and "western civilisation" and Socrates, but what the heck ...

Rubio’s Greece speech is MAGA’s latest classical cover story
Curtis Dozier

...The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker. 

And with that preview done and dusted, what else was there to contemplate this day?

The pond feared that, by eliminating all the basest of the reptile loons, it had arrived at a blank canvas, but huzzah, old faithful war horse and rogue biddy Dame Groan hovered into view to warn that we'll all be rooned ...

The header: Judith Sloan
A workable gas reservation policy? I think not

Hear the clarion call of the bot: Listen to this article
4 min

The caption for the frankly terrible opening illustration: Australia's oil and gas infrastructure as the lifeblood of the nation's economy. Sources: iStock. Artwork: Frank Ling

The plea for the mighty tech bro G: Make us preferred on Google

There will be a few wimps who will say that they've read all this before, but remember, it's not just the art of endless visual representations, there must also be endless text recylings.

Dame Groan groaning about gas and renewables is an eternal, never ending classic ...

There are legitimate grounds for a government imposing a gas reservation policy as long as it’s declared before investments are made. Those risking their money can assess whether to proceed based on the requirement that a certain percentage of output must be reserved for domestic use.
But that is not what the Albanese government has in mind. It wants to impose conditions on the big gas exporters to reserve 20 per cent of their output to be available for domestic use. In this way, the domestic market can be somewhat oversupplied – a figure of 110 per cent is mentioned – thereby creating downward pressure on domestic gas prices.
Bear in mind here there is not one domestic gas market in Australia and there are major constraints because of the lack of pipeline connection. And why would Western Australia want to participate because it has its own scheme? It also doesn’t bear thinking how the scheme would work in the Northern Territory because there are no substantial case users there.
The whole idea reminds me of that famous quote from Friedrich Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
Throw in women and I’m fully on board.

It's part of the reptile lexicon to throw in dire examples of renewables, with dastardly solar the thumb image for this AV distraction ...

Next video thumbnail
Australia would be ‘entirely reliant’ on renewables if Albanese government got its way
The Samuel Griffith Society Executive Director Mia Schlicht says Australia’s energy system would be “entirely reliant” on wind and solar if the Albanese government got its way.

Any mention of renewables always sends Dame Groan deep into the deep end of the "we're all rooned" pool ...

Let’s be clear here: the Albanese government’s previous attempt to regulate domestic gas prices when they soared after the outbreak of the Ukraine war was a complete disaster. Some misguided Treasury officials thought it was possible to control both price and quantity, suggesting that they should never have passed their economics degrees.
The end result was exemption after exemption, with domestic gas prices remaining high. Good one Jim, good one Chris.
Let’s be clear on another matter: the coal-seam gas fields in Queensland would never have been developed were it not for meeting export demand. It’s all very well to try to turn this around and expect those LNG exporters to meet domestic needs, but if that had been the case in the first place, the investments, certainly the extent of them, would probably never have occurred.
Recall also that the Rudd/Gillard government contemplated introducing a reservation scheme at that time and rejected it.

Is there anything that will appease here? Sure, an image celebrating sweet, dinkum, virginal, completely clean and innocent Oz coal A coal seam gas well head in the Surat Basin, Queensland.

At this point some cynic might attempt a Graham Readfearn billy goat butt ...

Heretics!

Dame Groan wasn't having any of that sort of carry on ... she was all in on gassing the planet, as you'd expect from a Santos devotee ...

It’s worth noting here the complete hypocrisy of some of the states, particularly Victoria and NSW, in this policy space. Their governments complain about high gas prices but have done everything in their power to block new gas developments.
The Victorian government even went to the trouble of inserting a “no fracking’ provision in its constitution – I ask you? This was done in the full knowledge that the once ample gas supplies in Bass Strait were running out. NSW produces no domestic gas at all and yet it has impeded the development of the gas project at Narrabri at every step of the way – both Coalition and Labor governments.
In fact, various plans to import gas into Victoria and NSW are reasonably developed. The costs would be horrendous, but supply might be able to be guaranteed.
So, what should we make of Resources Minister Madeleine King’s presentation to the National Press Club? It was easy to gain the impression she didn’t much want to talk about the gas reservation policy, preferring to drone on about the importance of resources, particularly critical minerals.

Cue the villainess herself ... Madeleine King addresses the National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

Her presence made Dame Groan very mad ...there was no way that renewables should be allowed in country, not when it and the planet could be gassed.

She quickly skated over the details of the now tabled reservation legislation, pointing to the watered-down ministerial discretion. She also mentioned eliminating loopholes and the potential for gaming – read my lips, the bureaucrats would have no idea about this stuff.
The key danger is that the intervention will drive domestic prices below the long-run marginal cost of new gas projects. Add in the large element of uncertainty and it’s entirely possible that investment in local gas projects will simply dry up. Of course, there are plenty of activists on the Left who would be happy with this outcome.
Any short-run relief in terms of gas prices would very quickly be followed by much higher prices. While King regards gas as vital to Australia’s energy future, including for the processing of critical minerals and firming the electricity grid, her words could easily turn out to be hollow.
The scheme doesn’t come into play until 2028, but the disincentive to invest has already started. The truth is that Australia has oodles of gas; it’s just that it’s in the ground. It may stay there for many years, if not decades. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot.

Shooting ourselves in the foot? Maybe ...

Never mind, the hive mind was right behind Dame Groan ... except for one heretic ...

And as this is the penultimate post for a time, the pond thought it would drop in on the lizard Oz editorialist for a last whiff of what's behind the hive mind ...

Achieve a two state solution while Benji is all in on a greater Israel from the river to the sea? Good luck with that, as the ethnic cleansing continues apace.

And there was this effort, a rousing reminder of the Dame Groan reptile way ...

And with that the pond will be up tomorrow for a final post, hopefully then returning in goodly time for ongoing reptile disasters, including the pending US election mid-terms, because what could possibly go wrong?

That's cruel ...

Finally a reminder of one of the cankers at the core ... Alex Gibney says Universal ‘wavered’ over releasing Elon Musk documentary
The revelation comes after the four-hour film’s Venice premiere drew a string of criticisms and insults from the founder of SpaceXAI

In which the bromancer goes rabid and bites the mad king, while Dame Slap stays rabid and savages Malware ...

 

This day the lizard Oz jihad on Jimbo cranked up another notch (it's way beyond eleven):

SIGNATURE SPEECH
‘We shouldn’t turn on fellow Aussies,’ says Chalmers but PM undermines Jim
The Treasurer warned left-wing activists not to campaign against One Nation voters from a position of ‘smug moral superiority’, but an Anthony Albanese anecdote undermined his Treasurer.
By Greg Brown

Talk about an easy target for a Brownie bushwhacking...

Jim Chalmers has warned left-wing activists not to campaign against One Nation from a position of “smug moral superiority”, declaring his budget of tax hikes was needed to stem the voter drift to the “far right” as it showed Labor was up-ending the status quo.
Declaring his lifetime in the battler suburb of Logan meant he “carried with me” a “genuine respect and understanding”, the Treasurer said supporters were “mourning a loss of control” and treated “feelings … as real as facts” but counselled that Labor “shouldn’t turn on them”.
The significant speech was delivered minutes before Anthony Albanese publicly admitted to rolling his Treasurer and personally intervening to extend the deadline for businesses to pay their tax bills via credit card.

And so on, and moving quickly along to avoid the sight of roadkill, and with the reptiles having spent the last week pumping up the Josh volume (it was way beyond eleven), it was left to Geoff to chamber a round at him ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Frydenberg to come riding back? Hold your horses
Is Josh Frydenberg back in federal politics? It’s not a done deal yet in the former Liberal treasurer’s mind
Josh Frydenberg is expected to poll and focus group every nook and cranny across Kew, Hawthorn and Camberwell before deciding to run against his Teal nemesis Monique Ryan in 2028.

Who cares, who gives a FF? Is he attempting some modern version of a vacillating Hamlet?

Beyond the valley of the pallid, the insipid, the ineffectual and the weak-kneed, while over on the extreme far right, the MAGA cap-donning Dame Slap was conducting her own personal jihad against Malware...

The pond just had to savour that snap of a preening Malware, jostling up against a man who's out of his depth ...

As for the actual content, thank the long absent lord for the intermittent archive ...

The ‘broad church’ is in ruins. What now for the Libs?
One simple thing would be to expel Malcolm Turnbull from the party. If he wants to play martyr, let him. It can’t be any worse than it is right now.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

As soon as a scribbler insists on "MUST", the pond knows that it must ignore the blather, but the pond is prepared to go as far as a teaser trailer ...

Sigh, not the "climate ideology" again, said by a scribbler without a 'science' bone in her denialist body.

The pond had not the slightest interest in defending Malware, nor in this jihad against him, nor the blinkered bigotry involved in it ... but, as always, Dame Slap managed an astonishing display of projection ...

That screen cap missed the barking mad nub of it ...

Liberals took leadership roles championing the voice was a betrayal of the most basic tenet for conservatives: that every human being must be treated equally under our founding document, the Constitution.
If you didn’t support the dogma on net zero, you were treated as a philistine. If you didn’t agree with the voice, you were likely labelled a racist.
This is how the left treats freedom of speech – agree with it, or it will shame you into silence or submission.
The complete surrender of the Liberal Party on traditional centre-right cultural issues was so abject that some Liberals – even former prime ministers – adopted a deliberate strategy.
Don’t talk about the culture wars, they said. Instead, discussing immigration became racist, expressing gender-critical views was hateful and questioning DEI was straight-out oppression.
The problem for the Liberal Party is its left flank. Can we please stop calling them “moderates”; there is nothing moderate about them. More comfortable shuffling around the left ecosystem of Labor-Green-teals, they cannot avoid responsibility for the cultural and economic carnage under way in this country.

Join with Dame Slap and go further right, beefy boofhead, and soon too you'll be donning a MAGA cap and surrounded by shadowy figures ...

Luckily the bromancer was on hand to save the pond from the madness ...

Watching him cope with what Faux Noise has bequeathed to the world should become a national sport, as the reptiles gave him a big splash...

The reptiles' artwork is achieving new levels of AI brilliance on a daily basis ...

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
Donald Trump’s making the worst decisions of his US presidency

The pleasure of a bot voice read: Listen to this article
5 min

Huzzah, a return of Frank with his usual frankly feeble collage, with a meaning and significance impossible to decipher: Donald Trump stands defiant amid swirling symbols of conflict. Pictures: iStock. Artwork: Frank Ling

The desperate cry from behind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

Usually the bromancer tries a both siderist tack. You know, King Donald has done some good things, but some of his decisions have been mildly unfortunate.

Not so this day. The bromancer was beside himself, quivering with indignation, though the sight of a jelly thinking it had a spine might unnerve some...

Under the twin pressures of looming mid-term congressional elections, and the physical and intellectual decline which almost always begins to afflict men in their ninth decade, Donald Trump has in the last few days made the worst decisions of his presidency, if not his entire life.
One of the worst things Trump has ever done as president is to reverse course on Russia and Ukraine and reward Vladimir Putin for nearly five years of murderous aggression against Ukraine.
Trump has suspended US sanctions against Russia so that it can sell several hundred thousand barrels of diesel to the US and other parties. This suggests how desperate Trump is politically. He says this will reduce US fuel prices. In fact the Russian supplies are probably not big enough to affect US retail prices, certainly not before the mid-terms on November 3. Trump desperately wanted something to announce.
Consider the strategic cost of the incoherence of US policy and the shocking strategic betrayal of Ukraine. Barely five minutes ago Washington was going to levy punitive sanctions against India for buying Russian oil and thereby contributing to Moscow’s war effort.
Now that Trump needs the fuel, all that’s thrown in the trash can.
Not to mention that this is a morally indefensible and contemptible way for the US to treat its ally, Ukraine.

Not before time there came an AV distraction ...

Next video thumbnail
Trump fumes over the ‘ridiculous’ war as Putin and Zelensky ‘don’t know how to make a deal’
US President Donald Trump expresses frustration against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky for ‘not knowing how to make a deal’ over the ongoing war. “Last month, they lost 32,000 people mostly soldiers … it’s ridiculous that war,” Mr Trump said. “I settled eight wars … I thought this would be one of the easier ones but it’s not. “We’re going to get that deal done.”

The bromancer carried on ranting ...

Russia invaded Ukraine without any cause or justification. This is black and white. Ukraine fought back heroically and received help from the US and Europe. An American leader with one scrap of decency would help raise the cost of Moscow’s aggression and persuade it to agree a ceasefire.
Trump’s only effort to exert leverage, instead, is against Ukraine.
Trump wants Ukraine to give up territory within the Donbas, and beyond, which Moscow has been unable to take by military force. Putin has apparently told Trump that if Ukraine does that, he’ll end the war.
But this would leave Ukraine gravely at risk strategically, behind not only reduced but less defensible borders, and open to subsequent Russian invasion after the Kremlin has a few years to recover and digest its winnings.
The single most repellent factor in Trump’s political persona is his sycophancy towards powerful dictators – Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un. He’ll act against weak dictators like Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and he thought he could get a quick victory in Iran. But strong man dictators get nothing but servile deference from Trump, interspersed with very occasional bouts of fatuous bluster.
Perhaps nothing more fully indicates his increasingly erratic mixture of hubris, ego, miscalculation and personalised magical thinking than Trump announcing that Russia and Ukraine had agreed on a ceasefire of strikes against each others’ energy infrastructure.
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky had no warning of such an announcement. If Putin made some kind of nod to Trump in a private telephone conversation, the Russians nonetheless showed the contempt in which he holds Trump by bombing Ukrainian energy targets hours after Trump’s announcement.
Putin humiliated Trump, so naturally Trump lashed out at Zelensky. Trump demanded Zelensky be replaced as president, a demand previously made only by Putin. Trump’s officials threatened to refuse even to allow European governments to buy US weapons for Ukraine, and to cut off intelligence from Ukraine.

Say what? If Putin made some kind of nod to Trump in a private telephone conversation...

WTF?

Still pandering? Still unable to cope? 

He lied, he made it up, he's in the grip of sundowning dementia ...

"Well, they agreed. You know why? ... 'I said you agree'" 

He was talking to himself in the wee witching hours, while between Truth Social posts.

Cue a snap of the demented king ...Trump wants Ukraine to give up territory within the Donbas, and beyond, which Moscow has been unable to take by military force. Picture: AFP

All the same, the bromancer's turning continued in a most satisfying way ...

Trump is intimidating US allies, fawning over US enemies. It’s ugly and counter-productive.
This is Trump behaving much worse than in his first term – indeed undoing allied co-operation projects he prosecuted in his first term – much worse even than in the first 18 months of this term. Can Trump no longer handle pressure? Is frustration with the way the world refuses to co-operate with his delusions now leading him into policy by wild temper tantrum?
These are gravely worrying times for US allies, which should nonetheless keep the alliance structures in place in the hope that Trump settles down, and alliance mechanisms can be fully revived after Trump’s gone.
But in some ways the most grotesque Trump move in recent days was allowing Pete Hegseth, who has no business being US Defence Secretary, to announce that Washington would livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of a terrorist mass shooting at a US military base in 2009.
Australians, most Western citizens, no longer support the death penalty. However, it has wide support in the US; 27 US states still practice it. Bill Clinton authorised executions when as Arkansas governor.
However, to conduct an execution publicly is immoral and profoundly offensive. It will make the executed terrorist a hero among jihadists everywhere and provide them with priceless propaganda footage. It also gravely coarsens American life. And it’s a fundamental abuse of human rights.
Even a prisoner to be executed is a human being and deserves to have his human dignity respected. Civilised societies like the US do not, as a matter of policy, taunt, torture and publicly humiliate prisoners. This is just sick, a graver offence to civilised values than anything Trump has come up with previously.
If this is what the next two years of Trump look like, we’re entering dark times.

"Entering", bromancer? 

It's been dark times these past ten years, thanks to you bloody Murdochians ... but as a result of the bromancer's turning, the hive mind began to show a dangerous tendency towards splitting and schism ...

The pond almost fainted when QLA replied to Ian with a dire heretical answer: "Yes"!

What a relief to see a few of the hive mind stayed solid, even as it came to this in the lizard Oz. 

Relax Ian, settle back for a fun reversion to Roman times:

What else?

Well there was Nick, but the pond is always inclined to think he should get nicked...

The Greens denounce US-style ‘imperialism’… then embrace it
They need the kind of politics capable of speaking to people outside activist group chats.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

It was just the usual serve of Zionism, servicing the needs of the Australian Daily Zionist News, and a reminder of how John Curtin must be revolving in his grave at a furious pace ...

Oh and the reptiles found space for Jane Hume, but she would say this, wouldn't she?

Labor’s climate red tape is a killer for small business
Australia’s businesses should be building our prosperity, not buried in paperwork.
By Jane Hume
Contributor

Climate change? Climate science? The impact of the changing climate on all forms of business, long, short, and tall?

Go whistle at the wind ...

And while embracing AI and bots and importuning Google to pay attention, the reptiles felt brave enough to serve up a little AI bashing, apparently unaware that refusing to use "SI" made them the enemy of the people ...

I’ve worked in AI for years. The tech giants are taking us for a ride
What the government is proposing is extremely unpopular, with virtually no supporters but the AI companies themselves.
By Ed Newton-Rex

There was an infallible Pope for that ...

Eric was also briefly over on the extreme far right, a rare concession to the lizard Oz's business coverage ...

‘Shotgun wedding’: Inside the ASX’s bitter biotech stand-off
Two companies united by the goal of saving lives are at war with each other in an ASX power struggle involving billionaires, a fund manager kingmaker and a mystery stakeholder.
By Eric Johnston
Associate Editor

The pond rushed through that mob, but the least the pond can do is reassure the MAGA-fied lizard Oz hive mind that some things were still normal, in their usual abnormal way ...

Know who else isn't a member? Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and North Korea, fine company for the reptiles ...

And with that noted, and as the pond will shortly be signing off as it makes a move to Pixie Paddocks (aka Fairy Meadowns), the pond wanted to save a little space in order to point of a few Fintan O'Toole moments.

The pond has always had a soft spot for Fintan O'Toole in the NYRB, a way to recover some brain cells after hard days hitting the lizard Oz books.

Gulliver’s Warning
Like Gulliver in Lilliput, “greatness” in the political realm depends on the existence of a group deemed puny or weak. (*intermittent archive link)

In celebrating one of the pond's favourite books, Fintan also managed to put in the boot ...

...The reactionary politics of today is a politics of the sublime—pain invoked, pain distanced, pain rendered politically delightful. This was true of Brexit, which depended on invoking an idea of Britain (in fact a free and prosperous country) as enslaved and oppressed by the European Union. And it is true of Trump. Before him American political rhetoric (including conservative rhetoric) had a grammar of uplift—the American Dream, Kennedy’s New Frontier, Reagan’s Morning in America, Obama’s arc of history bending toward justice. But Trump, from the beginning of his campaign in 2015, went for the full sublime. He created a vision of America as a hellhole—what he called in his first inaugural address “American carnage.” He imagined it for his fans as a country on the verge of obliteration. But he also presented, of course, a dramatic denouement: the appearance of what Gulliver called “the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World” to transform this abjection into its opposite—greatness.

And he was in fine form when the hard copy of the magazine arrived in the letterbox early this week ...

Devils in America
The lessons that Donald Trump learned from Roy Cohn—lie, cheat, engage in unlimited corruption—now shape official government policy in the US. (*intermittent archive link)

The book reviewed:

American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump
by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
Scribner, 509 pp., $32.00

Fintan provided a timely reminder that the rot in American politics goes way back to the 1950s, and to the deeply closeted Roy Cohn (shades of the parrot),, the mad king's McCarthyist mentor:

...In 2017 Trump famously asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” The answer stares at him from the mirror: he is his own Roy Cohn. Though the influence of his lawyer and fixer on the young Trump is common knowledge, not the least of the virtues of Bird’s punchy, racy, and appropriately nauseating new biography is the renewed force it gives to this cliché. There is something eerie about the thoroughness of Trump’s mimicry of Cohn’s way of dealing with the world: lie relentlessly, refuse to pay small bills, respond to all criticism with smears and threats, claim all defeats as triumphs, sue everybody all the time, weaponize the law and, when you can, the entire justice system, learn from the Mafia, use the phone to avoid leaving a paper trail, always present your highly privileged self as a victim of the elites, divide the world into allies to be used and enemies to be abused, into the winners who must be flattered and the losers who are there to be exploited in every imaginable way.
Trump’s language is Cohn’s language (always preface a big lie with “if you wanna know the truth”) and so is his whole style of public speaking—Cohn taught him to ad lib everything. Above all, Trump learned one very big thing from Cohn: that the veneer of morality in the American upper class is very thin. Cohn proved conclusively that there is no limit to its tolerance for corruption. Trump got that message—and so did Jeffrey Epstein.

These were just a few of the delicacies served up ...

...Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the screenplay for The Apprentice, makes Cohn a full-on deconstructionist who tells the young Trump that “there is no right and wrong. There is no morality. There is no Truth with a capital T. It’s a construct. It’s a fiction. It’s manmade…. You create your own reality.” And, one might add, your own unreality. More than anything else, Cohn was a swindler, and like all good con men he knew how to disappear from the domain of hard facts. Bird writes that “he left behind no private papers, not even an archive of his legal career. He had destroyed just about everything.”

...Just as Cohn defied the distinctions between reality and unreality and between life and death, he also broke down the divisions between fame and infamy. He grasped with remarkable clarity the truth that American celebrity has no moral content. When Trump claimed in the 2005 pussygate tapes that “when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” he was merely stating the facts as Cohn had shown them to be. Cohn made himself, first and foremost, a star. After that, none of his crimes ever really mattered, except in the sense that notoriety was even more valuable than adulation.

...For the rich and famous, Cohn thus combined the magnetic attractions of both obscenity and obscurity. Everyone knew at some level that he was a very nasty piece of work but everyone believed that, like some black magician, he was able to command the forces of darkness. It was always better to have Satan in your corner—even if the devil was as likely to defraud you as to help you.
And “everyone” means an astonishing range of the rich and famous: from the Catholic archdiocese of New York (Cohn was close to Cardinal Francis Spellman and his successor, Cardinal Terence Cooke) to Mafia hoodlums like “Fat Tony” Salerno and Carmine Galante; from his great friend Si Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast, to Bianca Jagger (whose divorce from Mick he handled); from Rupert Murdoch to Estée Lauder, from the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to the owners of Studio 54, the nightclub at which he himself was a fixture. Nancy Reagan called him often from the White House because he could supply a fix of her favorite drug: gossip. Cohn became the connective tissue of New York society: at his parties Andy Warhol could meet Trump (whom he called “really good-looking…. He’s a butch guy”) or Chuck Schumer.

And this was the closer ...

...The gay community in Provincetown was disgusted by the sight of Cohn with underage boys on his yacht. Disturbingly, Bird, ignoring the dynamics of sex trafficking, refers to these children as “hustlers,” a term he would surely not apply to Epstein’s victims. But he does give a shocking account of the experiences of Richard Kerr, who from the age of eight was incarcerated in the notorious Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast, which was run by pedophiles with alleged links to British intelligence. Kerr says that when he was sixteen he was trafficked to have sex with Cohn in Venice.
The account is entirely credible, but it will fall back into the category of rumor, gossip, innuendo. Even if it is true, how could the rich and famous and the righteous Republicans for whom Cohn is still a patriotic hero possibly have known such things? For them, it was enough to know that Cohn’s unscrupulous brutality was at their service. In everything he did, he confirmed for them the only truth they ever really wanted to know: that, in the end, there is only power. In his all-inclusive depravity, he liberated them from the nagging burdens of morality. A world in which Cohn could thrive was a world in which truth and justice were indeed mere constructs.
Bird’s horrifying biography makes the ultimate political triumph of this malevolence seem far less surprising. In Angels in America, Kushner has Cohn ascend, after his crucifixion, to heaven and then return “dressed in a fabulous floor-length black velvet robe de chambre.” He must surely now come down from wherever he is and enter the President’s Bedroom on the second floor of the White House, in the early hours when the Truth Social posts have stopped, to sit quietly by the bed and relish his vindication. He is the founding father of the rotten republic.

And that's just the beginnings of why the Unites States doesn't want the scrutiny of an international court, but does want to stage public executions ...

The pond revisited that movie recently, and decided it was inclined to be tortured and overwrought, but with some tidy performances ...

And now, as talk of public executions is all the go, and stonings in the square is the thing du jour in federal parliament (well played Liberal MP Angie Bell), why not go the full Old Testament hog?

The radicalisation of the pond continues with a serve of Dame Groan and the bromancer ...

 

So one minute the lizard Oz was reporting that the radicalised suicidal and homicidal co-pilot was part of a premeditated operation planned by the likes of Iran (here);  and the next minute that he'd been radicalised by living in Australia.

That the pond could understand. The pond has been dangerously radicalised by being exposed to a daily diet of lizard Oz "news" and opinions.

Who could add to the pond's radicalisation this day?

A horde of contenders rushed into view, but these days the pond has become selective in its diet.

While the pond appreciated Toby's assault on the perfidious French - how diabolical and insulting to call them Greeks - it lacked the necessary radicalising fizz...

Has France become the new Greece of Europe?
History shows that financial crises can spread remarkably quickly once confidence begins to deteriorate.
By Toby Johnston

... so the pond personally supervised its transfer to the intermittent archive so that its feeble attempt at radicalisation was to hand for all.

Ditto Damon (Damon?) Johnson's effort, which could only radicalise forlorn southern sparrows (you know who you are...

Why Labor is backing One Nation’s Pickering to join debate
Warren Pickering wants in. Ben Carroll wants him in. Why Jess Wilson is not so sure.
By Damon Johnston
Melbourne Bureau Chief

As for the "lead" news story, the only thing of note was the new snap of a completely bewildered Jimbo ...

EXCLUSIVE
Trusts trap: Tax office, Labor in twin hits as businesses brace
Trusts trap: ATO and Labor in twin hits as businesses forced to pay heavily
Small businesses and families face up to $13.3bn in restructuring and advice costs as the ATO cracks down on decades-old trust paperwork errors ahead of Labor’s looming reforms.
By Sarah Ison and Thomas Henry

The pond would love to be the fly on a wall in the editorial meetings where hit jobs are handed out ...with stout-hearted old diggers joining with Pauline to set up a wail ...

EXCLUSIVE
Hanson issues enterprising put-down of Chalmers
The One Nation leader attacked the Treasurer’s lack of private sector experience and told business chiefs her party is their champion.
By Geoff Chambers

"Enterprising"? "Issues"? What judicious, wise use of words ...

COMMENTARY by DENNIS SHANAHAN
Five months in and Dr Jim’s budget blunder still causing pain
No budget still at the centre of negative news and politics nearly six months after it was brought down can be called a political success.

On the upside, all this spared the pond from more Josh v. Beefy Boofhead, or freedumb boy ...

Besides, if the pond wants this sort of stuff, it won't turn to a recycling of the thoughts of a fake ranga. It'll reach for the OP Bundy rum ...

A strong Hayekian start, with subtle flavours of Robin Hood on the back palate.

And then there's the coffee. Let the overlords drink coffee!

The pond did its best to care, but it sounded just like another jihad ... one day death taxes, the next trusts, then the price of coffee (remember the good old days when you made your own and developed skills at making heart and fern shapes?) ...

It must be time for an AV distraction ...

By golly the reptiles seem to have an inexhaustible supply of snaps of Jimbo looking quizzical or bewildered ... and so to the final gobbet ...

The pond acknowledges it gave the old groaner short shrift by dishing her out in screen caps, but why not swallow down your daily dose of "we'll all be rooned" in four short gulps?

On with even more dangerous radicalisation, this time at the hand, or keyboard, of the bromancer.

He always knows the best way to get  a firing squad of stupidity into top shape...

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
The Greens are the worst antisemites

The call of the bot: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption of a snap of a possible Satanist: Green Party leader Zack Polanski delivers his speech during day one of the Green Party annual conference. Picture: Getty Images

The yearning for the Big G's attention: Make us preferred on Google

Not the bromancer, not another edition of the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Correspondents sent into terminal despair at the thought know the pond's drill.

First a little balance by reverting to a Haaretz story which takes up the themes explored in that notorious documentary NAZA. 

There's an interview with the co-director on YouTube.

A new documentary, “NAZA,” provides a searing look into the inner-workings of the Israeli military’s operation in the Gaza Strip. Its namesake is derived from a Hebrew military term for “collateral damage.” Academy Award-winning director and investigative journalist Yuval Abraham joined Jacob Soboroff to discuss the film's implications, and the discoveries he made while making it. 

The Haaretz story provided details of war crimes in abundance:

'Even the Lowest-Ranking Target Justified Civilian Casualties': Israeli Intelligence Soldiers Detail Gaza Policy Shift (*intermittent archive)

This is how ethnic cleansing goes down ...

...According to A., who was also involved in the mission, those in the strike cell knew that a particularly large number of civilians could be harmed. Military Intelligence's calculations of potential collateral damage put the figure at roughly 250 to 300 people, so the decision was referred directly to the chief of staff for approval. The IDF, by contrast, says its collateral damage estimate was around 100 people. The soldiers say far more were ultimately killed.
After the strike, A. says, a damage assessment was conducted to establish what had happened on the ground.
"Among other things, we relied on figures coming from Hamas, which we considered relatively plausible, even if they weren't 100 percent accurate," he says. "As time went on, we realized the death toll was around 250. I remember being stunned that we were bringing down several densely populated buildings, killing and injuring hundreds of people, to kill a battalion commander who, just a few weeks earlier, hadn't even been someone we were supposed to gather intelligence on."

There's a lot more in that story, but it's time for the bromancer to keep radicalising the pond ...

The Greens political movement, in Australia and internationally, has emerged as an important generator of antisemitic prejudice, indeed hatred. The election of David Shoebridge as leader of the Greens doesn’t moderate this ugly trend, but consolidates it.
The Greens, in Australia and internationally, partly emerge from, and embody, the dominance of the far-left worldview that now dominates Western universities, especially in the humanities. This is a central element to the crisis that afflicts Australia and most Western societies. Universities have become, in part, agents of hatred, prejudice, ideological extremism and delusional paranoia in public policy.
It goes without saying that many good things happen at Australian universities. But there’s also a profoundly ideological crisis on our campuses. The royal commission into antisemitism, as well as mostly ignoring Islamist antisemitism, has barely touched university antisemitism, especially humanities’ classrooms. The real reason authorities baulk at confronting ugly antisemitic demonstrations is that these demonstrations give expression to the universities’ broader intellectual environment. To change them fundamentally would require a cultural revolution at universities. None of our leaders are up for this.
It should be noted this is a bipartisan failure. The Coalition was in office for a decade and no useful reform of universities, schools or other cultural organisations more widely took place. This is not a question of freedom of speech. It’s a question of vast taxpayer funding being used to undermine and destroy the basic tenets of civic and human decency.

Human decency? Per Haaretz:

The soldiers' accounts describe an entirely different approach to warfare since October 7, 2023, in which even the lowest-ranking target justified civilian casualties. Their testimony suggests that the high casualty figures the army calls collateral damage were not isolated mishaps or individual identification errors, but the result of a strike policy stretched to its limits. Haaretz has published similar accounts throughout the three years of war. These policies, combined with an effort to compensate for the intelligence failure of October 7, led the military to turn a blind eye to a civilian toll unlike anything it had ever seen.
'We were striking small fry'
One change the soldiers describe after October 7 was the opening of the intelligence apparatus to untrained personnel.
"People arrived at Military Intelligence who weren't from the unit, reservists who'd never even served in intelligence, brought in from all sorts of places," says A. "They sat in the Targeting Directorate looking for the most insignificant targets, the small fry, so they could kill them. Anyone displaying Hamas symbols on Facebook or identifying themselves as Hamas was marked as a target. Some were Hamas members, some were fighters too, but they really were small fry."
D., who served in strike cells – rear command teams that coordinate drone and other aerial strikes and act as the "eyes" of troops on the ground – reinforces that account as he describes how the criteria and methods changed.
"We were always told that things would look different in a war," he says. "But this was something else entirely. Suddenly, the IDF was striking even the lowest of the low indiscriminately, and everyone had forgotten about conserving ammunition. We were striking Hamas drivers. That's how far it went."

Apparently here's a local variant of alleged Satanism, given the honour for daring to point out the indecent: David Shoebridge holds a press conference at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

On with the lesser Lesser commaning all to "make it so"...

Opposition shadow education minister Julian Leeser has introduced a bill to try to force universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism, which has been officially adopted by the Albanese government, all the states and indeed even the National Student Ombudsman, but not the majority of Australian universities. 

Stop right there. This was one submission in relation to that matter (you'll need to search to find the link, it being a pdf download):

Shades of grey bro, shades of grey ... though perhaps not for you or the lesser Leeser:

Speaking, powerfully, on Monday to support his bill, Leeser said: “When it comes to antisemitism, our public university campuses have a lot to answer for.”
Addressing the universities directly, Leeser said: “In far too many cases, you have allowed Jew-hate to become normalised on your campuses. It always hides behind the fig leaf that the abuse and intimidation is not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist or anti-Israel. This is a pathetic and ridiculous excuse when the targets are overwhelmingly Australian staff and students, and we all know the word Zionist is just the politically acceptable way to say the word Jew.”
Leeser correctly identifies a key fellow traveller of this ideological sickness as the Greens party. He says: “The Greens are the party of antisemitism.” Last week this stark reality was revealed in all its ugliness in Britain. The British Greens are led by Zack Polanski, surely the most odious purveyor of hatred and extremism in mainstream Western politics. Australian Greens periodically express admiration for the British Greens.
The British Greens passed a formal resolution at their conference last week that declared Zionism is racism. They further declared that modern Israel should not exist at all, that the Jews of Israel should live as part of “a single, democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine”. The resolution praised and encouraged resistance against Israel “by all means available under international law”. Senior Greens figures promoting the resolution were clear that includes armed struggle.
A central feature of all this is to understand what Zionism is. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines Zionism as “a movement aiming at the re-establishment of the Jewish nation in Palestine”. Note the word “re-establishment”. Jews have lived in Jerusalem and surrounding areas for thousands of years. It’s insane to call Israel a colonial nation. However, whether you like Israel or not, Zionism means, as the OED says, the idea that there should be a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Stop right there.

What is Zionism and why do some critics describe it as racist?
Green party debate over the motion ‘Zionism is racism’ comes amid renewed arguments over the meaning and history of a contested term

Shades of grey, bromancer, shades of grey.

Palestine wasn't some pristine terra nullius. 

There were people living there, and they'd been there for a long time...

Stay still What is Zionism? The different meanings of a contested term

...Most of these allegations concerned the alleged mistreatment of Jewish students and faculty who identify as Zionists, or merely refuse to denounce Zionism. That has led some administrations, such as Haverford’s, to explicitly affirm that it is forbidden to harass or otherwise discriminate against students who support Zionism – since such behavior has become increasingly common on some campuses in recent years.
As a scholar of Israel studies who teaches about Zionism, what strikes me when I read such statements is how narrowly they define it, reducing Zionism to a single belief in “the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and statehood in the land of Israel.”
This ignores the fact that there are multiple “Zionisms,” rather than a singular “Zionism,” and that the term has more than just one meaning. It is, at best, oversimplified to describe Zionism only as the belief in the right of Jews to have a Jewish state.

Shades of grey, bromancer, shades of grey ...

Oaky, the pond's interrupted more than enough. Cue a snap of the lesser Leeser: Federal Liberal MP Julian Leeser. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

And cue the bromancer ...

Modern Israel has been an independent state since 1948, just under 80 years. Every government, opposition and political party in the West that recognises Israel, such as the Albanese government, is definitionally Zionist. To call Zionism racism is to declare Israel, uniquely among all nations, wickedly illegitimate. Further, what the British Greens have done is stigmatise all British Jews who have any sympathy for Israel at all, who even utter the Jewish prayer “next year in Jerusalem”, as racists.
In doing this, the British Greens are intensely racist themselves, and justify racist persecution of Jews. Jews who attend “Zionist synagogues” are thus racist. Therefore, in this grotesque inversion of morality, to oppose racism the left opposes Jews. This is ugly antisemitism. The Nazis would approve.
Polanski is in his way so cowardly that he didn’t attend the vote on this resolution at his own conference. Under severe media scrutiny, he later said he would have voted against the resolution although he agreed with its substance. Happily, Polanski lost the by-election for former Labour leader Keir Starmer’s seat. Labour under Andy Burnham held on.
But the Greens, having passed this infamous, antisemitic, racist resolution, won a shocking 33 per cent of the vote. The British Greens are polling 11 per cent nationally. Other antisemitic parties poll well over 4 per cent. That means we now live in the unimaginable historic moment of so mainstreaming antisemitism that more than one in seven British voters now support openly antisemitic parties.

Did the bromancer have to drag climate science into it? 

He did, he did ...Greta Thunberg ...only to mourn the way that those bloody alarmists could hold more than one thought in the old noggin at a time ...

Hang on, hang on, say that again ...

Shoebridge is less verbally extreme than Mehreen Faruqi, whom he defeated for the leadership. But he leads a completely extreme party. While his language is marginally more civil – though he’s happy to call Coalition politicians “scumbags” – the substance of his leadership is extreme.

In mango Mussolini days, you're going to get agitated about a term. a word, a concept, that's within your lexicon?

The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan discusses the “terrible breakdown in civility” which has taken place in American politics. 
“Both sides of American politics, driven partly by social media, are very dangerously demonising each other,” Mr Sheridan told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. 
“When the worst of them generally are that, they are idiots; they are not really murderers and wannabe dictators and scumbags and all the rest of it.” (Less than 1,400 views for the bromancer and the Bolter? Happy days).

So the pond can call you an idiot and a barking mad Zionist, and that would pass the bromancer smell test?

On to the last flourish of extremist bromancer ...

He has himself shared and lauded maps that show Israel erased in one big Palestine sign, he’s identified with the “Free Palestine, from the river to the sea” slogan, he’s accused Israel of attempting to wipe the Palestinian people out, he’s described the accidental and tragic death of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom as Israeli “murder”, he routinely describes Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and says the Albanese government is “deeply complicit” in this genocide.
Shoebridge leads a far-left, extremist party, the Greens, as destructive an element of the sickness at the heart of our culture as anything we’ve seen.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

Speaking of the sickness at the heart of our culture, a sample of the lizard Oz hive mind at work ...

On the upside, the pond was spared the bromancer frantically scribbling that mad king Donald had done some good things, generally unspecified ...

And here's an interesting addendum. 

This is the sort of censorship routinely featured on a daily basis by the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Susan Abulhawa wins fight to restore censored Oxford Union speech on Israel apartheid

The deletions included her references to booby-trapped toys in southern Lebanon and allegations of sexual torture against Palestinian detainees, including her account of the death of Gaza surgeon Dr Adnan Al-Bursh. Other cuts removed criticism of Zionist claims to supremacy and of conduct during the Gaza genocide.

Here's the Oxford Union bit about the settlement ...

susan abulhawa and the Oxford Union are pleased to confirm they have resolved the dispute that arose between them regarding the publication of an edited video of her speech in the 28 November 2024 debate "This house believes Israel is an apartheid state engaged in genocide"

And here's the restored argument ...