In which the pond's pared back summer studies for serious herpetology students continues ...

 

The pond's cut down, barebones summer school for serious herpetology students continues with a tremendously exciting piece by a reptile rarely studied, but whose time has come with an astonishing exclusive.

In no more than a zillion words, students are required to write an essay on coulda, woulda, shoulda ... using example provided ...

Lift ban on nuclear energy: mine it, use it, store it, says Peter Costello

Alas one of the features of stripped back studies is that students are deprived of tremendous illustrations, and perforce must imagine this image ...

Former treasurer Peter Costello. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Daniel Pockett

Now, thanks unto ancient Troy, it's on with the EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
By troy bramston
8:18PM December 29, 2023

Do students need reminding already that they must write on the theme of coulda, woulda, shoulda ...

Peter Costello supports lifting the national ban on development of nuclear power to provide a new domestic energy source and help reduce carbon emissions, provided the private sector can see a commercial opportunity to make it viable.
“I would lift the ban,“ the former Liberal treasurer told The Weekend Australian.
“I would say it can only be done subject to very stringent safety standards and so on. But within that framework, if you reckon you can make a go of it – go ahead. I wouldn’t have a government subsidy because then the economics doesn’t stack up.”
The longest serving treasurer (1996-2007) said in an exclusive interview to coincide with the release of cabinet papers from 2003 on Monday that the Howard government considered lifting the ban put in place in 1998 and was aware of private-sector interest in developing the industry.
“I do recall a lot of consideration given to nuclear power,” Mr Costello said.
“There was a private-sector group that was looking at the feasibility of a nuclear power station. And I do recall senior ministers – me and the prime minister (John Howard) – saying, ‘well, we shouldn’t rule it out’.
“But, certainly, even then, subject to the economics stacking up, I had no objections to nuclear power. In fact, I thought it would have been a good adjunct to meeting our emissions targets … (but) if the economics didn’t stack up, no one would do it.”
Mr Costello said consideration was given at the time to depositing nuclear waste at the RAAF Woomera Range Complex in South Australia, the site of British nuclear tests authorised by the Menzies government in the 1950s and ’60s.

Students are reminded that they also need to explain in their essay how everything is the fault of perfidious Victorians.

Media-link
Victoria making all forms of energy expensive except renewables

Students are not to use that media-link. If they can't see how Victorians ruin everything on a daily basis, and that includes nuking the country, then they are unlikely to progress in reptile studies. Students who viciously point out that Petey boy represented Higgins for yonks will be marked down ...

At this point, the pond will helpfully point out to students that there are an excellent couple of shouldas to hand in the next sampling ...

“At one point, we had a proposal to put radioactive waste at the Woomera rocket range, which by the way, is already radioactive,” he recalled.
“I thought it was a good idea. I don’t know how far away Adelaide is from Woomera, but it’s a long way, and it just became politically too hot.”
Australia should examine storing waste from uranium exported overseas, the former Treasurer added. “What Australia should look at is we would own the nuclear rods, whole of life, so the nuclear rods would go off to whoever’s using them at the moment, they would use them, and then they would come back here and be stored by us. We would own life-cycle nuclear rods.”
“But this is the great joke: Australia is exporting uranium to countries all around the world. They are using our uranium for nuclear power: France, China, go around the world. So I can’t get worked up on health and safety grounds that we shouldn’t be doing this because if it is unsafe (then) we shouldn’t be exporting it.”

Extra marks are available to students who guess the name of the Nationals leader calling on Queensland to fix made of the country by evil, perfidious Victorians ...

Media-link
Nationals leader calls on Queensland govt to remove ban on nuclear

Only the deep north land of toads can fix things ... though perhaps Ted can too ...

Mr Costello’s comments follow those of opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien who is advocating the benefits of nuclear energy for domestic power use. Mr O’Brien argues that with more than 400 nuclear power plants in operation around the world, and small modular reactors in development, the technology should not be ruled out.
The Albanese government, while supporting nuclear-powered submarines under the trilateral AUKUS defence pact, is opposed to a nuclear power sector for Australia given it would cost too much money, is not commercially viable and would take too long to establish.

Students should note that ancient venerable Troy's piece concluded with a link to a piece entitled ...

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has labelled nuclear power as a “fantasy” for Australia.

Students are not encouraged to follow this link. Fantasies should be an important theme in the essay, including a mention of reptile nuke dreaming to save the planet by nuking it, with the rider that there's no need to save it because climate science is a fundamentalist religion, a hoax and a fraud ...

There was also an indication of astonishing pleasures to come ...

Read Troy Bramston’s interviews with John Howard and Peter Costello about the 2003 cabinet papers in The Australian on Monday

Students may include a short note detailing the wonders to be revealed. If only one prediction comes true, studies may be abandoned, and students can retreat to the beach to be fried like lobsters ...

Bolder and braver students might like to consider scribbling a shorter essay on the self-loathing routinely featured in pieces by former lawyer Dame Slap when scribbling about lawyers and any action which might happen to involve activist judges ...

A mention of self-loathing in the context of a deep hatred of women should be an important part of the essay, though the pond can only provide a shortened version of the text ...

...Dreyfus may argue, though he tabled no empirical evidence in support of this view, that measures to turbocharge claims of harassment and discrimination may help a claimant who would not otherwise get legal assistance. 
Mind you, even Kate Jenkins, on whose Respect@Work report the Dreyfus proposal was based, did not go as far as the Dreyfus proposal. Jenkins recommended a hard cost-neutrality approach in line with the Fair Work Act where parties bear their own costs unless the claim was vexatious or unreasonable.
Given the voracious appetite of lawyers and litigation funders to find and run new claims on a no-win, no-fee basis, or similar, this now familiar Dreyfus overreach is even more dubious. There is no justice in turbocharging an inevitable torrent of “pay me to go away” claims and adding another Labor brake on productivity.
Centuries of legal experience have told us the right balance is to allow costs to follow the result. The Albanese government’s desire to ring in the new year by giving presents to its friends is no reason to ignore the wisdom of the ages.
Dreyfus’s ill-conceived changes are also a thankyou to big Australian companies and their boards for being stupid, for keeping their head down and thinking Labor wouldn’t come for them.
What fools these highly paid executives and board directors were – and are. Almost all of them signed on to Albanese’s signature policy of a constitutionally entrenched voice even before there was any wording around it. For months and months they flaunted their faux virtue over a policy that would not help them or their shareholders one iota – a policy that was overwhelmingly rejected at the referendum because ordinary Australians understood what was at stake. This stand of corporate Australia was the biggest single act of collective corporate negligence in many, many years.
It was made much worse by the fact that concurrently these same big companies ignored the larger and more real risk of Labor’s workplace policies being legislated with the help of the corporate-hating Greens – polices that directly hurt companies, big and small. Their negligence is economy destroying. And their public whinging now about Labor policies should be greeted by Peter Dutton with a cold shoulder.
The Opposition Leader should fashion himself as the saviour of small business and leave those people on big corporate boards to live with the consequences of misusing their power.

The pond will break its down spartan, image deprived austerity rule to urge Dame Slap to scribble a piece in favour of the American legal system ...

The reason that the pond cut short Dame Slap in her rhetorical silly season prime was that the Angelic one had an important message for the period designed to celebrate peace and love in the name of Xianity.

Being a fundamentalist tyke, it ran along the lines of ... let the killing fields continue, let the collective punishment and ethnic cleansing flourish, let there be more deaths, let there be starvation and disease, let all suffer ... because noting what is going down is merely another form of radical chic ...

Palestinian cause adds to historic folly of radical chic

Sadly students must imagine flighty young fillies smirking and partying down in their radical chicness ...

A pro-Palestinian rally in Melbourne. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui*

In their essay, inspired by the Angelic one, students can expound at length on Jesus as a form of radical chic.

In the New Testament, war is universally seen as evil and Jesus emphasized peace instead. He advised us to avoid retaliation and revenge and to extend our love even to our enemies.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. (NIV, Matthew 5:38-45)

The apostle Paul and other New testament writers echoed Jesus' sentiment and expanded on it.

Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. Respect what is right in the sight of all men. If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay," says the Lord. "But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (NAS, Romans 12:17-21) (here with the good news that you can still keep on fussin' and feudin' and fightin')

The pond regrets the use of sources other than the KJV, on the basis that growing up tyke, the pond was once told that reading that version would see the pond spend a goodly time in purgatory ...

By angela shanahan
12:00AM December 30, 2023

Students should note that the Angelic one is apparently a Netflix user, and therefore clueless, because in her discussion of Maestro, she fails to mention the only significant thing about it.

The nose ...

Bradley Cooper has weighed in on controversy surrounding the use of a prosthetic nose in the film Maestro, in which he portrays the legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein.
After initial photos and a teaser for the film were released in August, some critics decried Cooper’s decision to don a prosthetic nose to star as Bernstein, who was Jewish. Daniel Fienberg, the Hollywood Reporter’s chief TV critic, called it “problematic” and described the film as “ethnic cosplay”. Others called the decision antisemitic, or used the derogatory term “jewface”.
Asked about the debate on CBS Mornings on Tuesday, Cooper said he initially considered not using the prosthetic, but decided to use it to resemble the renowned conductor, the son of Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants to the US perhaps best known for writing the music for West Side Story.
“I thought, ‘Maybe we don’t need to do it,’” he said. “But it’s all about balance, and, you know, my lips are nothing like Lenny’s, and my chin. And so we had that, and it just didn’t look right [without the prosthetic].”
The Anti-Defamation League was one of several organizations to come to the film’s defense, noting: “Throughout history, Jews were often portrayed in antisemitic films and propaganda as evil caricatures with large, hooked noses. This film, which is a biopic on the legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein, is not that.” (Graudian)

Advanced students might wander off to read Bradley Cooper's Maestro nose is a red herring: the real story is the wrinkles ...The fake schnozz has stolen the spotlight from the prosthetics which turn Cooper into an extraordinarily convincing elderly Leonard Bernstein – and remind us just how bad old-age makeup used to be...

... or they might just settle for the Angelic one's interpretation ...

There is a new film on Netflix a lot of people are talking about. For those of you who have been living in a cave, it is called Maestro, and for those one or two average suburbanites who aren’t addicted to Netflix, Maestro is about Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, promoter of fashionable good causes and wealthy Chilean-born socialite. Lenny, as he was known by his contemporaries, was a great American composer and conductor. Most people know him for West Side Story, justly, because it is probably his masterpiece.
However, what most people might not know, let alone remember about Lenny and Felicia, is the shocking semi-comical furore they caused over a fundraising party they gave in their Manhattan residence for the notoriously violent black separatists of the late 1960s and ’70s, the Black Panthers. This was the naive pre-virtue-signalling of rich white capitalists falling over themselves to support and entertain a bunch of murderous thugs, some of whom were in jail for threatening to blow up public facilities and trying to raise bail for those accused of similar crimes. The party was brilliantly and unforgettably satirised by Tom Wolfe in New York magazine as “radical chic”.
Wolfe was of course satirising the breathtaking stupidity of a fashion, born of vanity, of supposedly intelligent people who included some of the greats of the artistic milieu of the day. As the Black Panthers blathered on about their manifesto, having their own society, getting rid of white oppression, using violence in “self-defence” and so on, Lenny and the invitees lapped it up with the odd “right on” and Lenny’s favourite, “I dig it”. They were inspired by the thrill, the romanticism of danger, without actually understanding anything the Panthers said, and blithely ignoring what they had done. However, the glitterati were acutely aware they were setting a trend. They were the embodiment of radical chic.
Radical chic isn’t a new phenomenon. It was around in the days before the French Revolution when Marie Antoinette entertained the harbingers of the revolution that obliterated the monarchy. Today there is a lot of radical chic going around. Social media and films stars are addicted to it, for all sorts of causes. The most obvious example is the Palestinian cause, symbolised by the wearing of the keffiyeh.
This imagery of identification with the Palestinians has surfaced not just at demonstrations against the Israeli incursion into Gaza, but as a symbol of “solidarity” with Palestinians after theatrical performances in Sydney. It is no accident it has been taken on by people of the theatre. They love to dress up. Be prepared to see it on the cover of fashion magazines in the not-too-distant future, like the European models sporting laboriously teased-up Afros in the ’70s.
In fact, the keffiyeh has been fashionable for a while. I even bought some while travelling in the Middle East for my own kids. They loved them. Mind you, they were made in Jordan, not China, as doubtless many of the keffiyehs youngsters are wearing are made.
However, this is not about “cultural appropriation” and the wearing of a garment that has deep cultural significance. The keffiyeh is worn all over the Middle East and I’m sure some of the demonstrators have their Palestinian ones confused with their fetching red Jordanian ones, but even more confusing is whether the keffiyeh wearers bursting on stages and yelling at shoppers really think this is furthering their cause? After all, this is Australia. No one can stand between a shopper and his new large-screen television.

At this point, some might be distracted by talk of Marie Antoinette, but the pond urges students to focus on the media link used to interrupt the Angelic one ...

Media-link
Sky News host slams anti-Israel protesters who claim Jesus was Palestinian

Again the pond must break its own rule to insert a bit of text from ancient times, when EB was judged a useful reference and every country town library had hard copies in prominent positions for students wanting a fast crib. Well at least they did in Tamworth ...

For the record then, let it be noted that Jesus was neither Jewish nor Palestinian and certainly not swarthy. He most closely resembled Jeffrey Hunter or perhaps Robert Powell, and if he didn't always have blonde hair, then he certainly had blue eyes ..

Now as the killing fields continue apace, let the Angelic one bring you light and understanding in a way beyond your ignorant vulgar youff follies ...

The truth is the history of the Middle East is a mystery to most young Australians. If our appalling education standards are anything to go by, most Australians under about 40 are too ignorant of any stuff about their own country’s history to indulge in immature disruptions for a political cause that has nothing to do with them. I suspect the newly aggressive tone of these demonstrations is more about upsetting despised Mr and Mrs Ordinary Australian, residents of despised capitalist suburbia, than the origins of the Arab Israeli conflict. I have no doubt the slogan-shouting keffiyeh wearers are being manipulated by the same Trotskyist-inspired mob that was calling for the destruction of Israel when I was at university more than 30 years ago, ignoring that it was the only stable democratic state in the Middle East. It would be more difficult for young Australians to study the history of the various cultures of the Middle East than to yell at shoppers to “support” a people whose culture and history they wear, as it were, lightly.
Orderly demonstrations on behalf of Palestine, or calling for a ceasefire, are perfectly justified. I too would like to see another pause, and although having been to Israel and admiring that nation, I have reservations about some Israeli policies. However, as a Christian Palestinian said to me: “Allies are important, but true allies know their place – and where their experience is limited.” The new “right on” keffiyeh wearers forget their limitations.

* Of course the pond couldn't resist showing that snap of vulgar youff in full flight ...

It's so much simpler than reporting actual news ...you know, talk of genocide ...

... and talk of actual ethnic cleansing ...

Tens of thousands of Palestinians streamed into an already crowded town at the southernmost end of Gaza in recent days, according to the United Nations, fleeing Israel's bombardment of the centre of the strip, where hospital officials said dozens were killed on Friday.
Israel's unprecedented air and ground offensive against Hamas has displaced some 85 per cent of the Gaza Strip's 2.3 million residents, sending swells of people to seek shelter in Israeli-designated safe areas that the military has nevertheless also bombed. That has left Palestinians with a harrowing sense that nowhere is safe in the tiny enclave.
Israel's widening campaign, which has already flattened much of the north, is now focused on the urban refugee camps of Bureij, Nuseirat and Maghazi in central Gaza, where Israeli warplanes and artillery have levelled buildings.
But fighting has not abated in the north, nor in the city of Khan Younis in the south, where Israel believes Hamas leaders are hiding. Militants have continued to fire rockets, mostly at Israel's south.
Israeli shelling over two days near Al-Amal hospital in southern Gaza's main city Khan Younis killed 41 people, the Palestinian Red Crescent said on Thursday.
The casualties include "displaced persons seeking shelter" at Red Crescent premises, it said.
The Gaza health ministry said on Friday that 187 people had been killed across Gaza over the past 24 hours.
The Israeli army also announced the death of one of its soldiers in Gaza, bringing the number of troops killed during the war inside the Palestinian territory to 168.
The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on Friday that an aid convoy came under fire from the Israeli military, without suffering any casualties.
"Israeli soldiers fired at an aid convoy as it returned from northern Gaza along a route designated by the Israeli army," UNRWA's director in Gaza, Tom White, wrote on social media platform X.
The UN said late on Thursday that around 100,000 people had arrived in Rafah, along the border with Egypt, in recent days. The influx crams even more people into one of Gaza's most densely populated areas.
People arrived in trucks, in carts and on foot. Those who haven't found space in the already overwhelmed shelters have built tents on the roadsides.
"People are using any empty space to build shacks," said UNRWA's Juliette Touma. "Some are sleeping in their cars, and others are sleeping in the open."
Israel has told residents of central Gaza to head south, but even as the displaced have poured in, Rafah has not been spared.
A strike on Thursday evening destroyed a residential building, killing at least 23 people, according to the media office of the nearby Al-Kuwaiti Hospital.
At the hospital, residents rushed in a baby whose face was flecked with dust and who wailed as doctors tore open a Mickey Mouse onesie to check for injuries.
Shorouq Abu Oun fled the fighting in northern Gaza a month ago and sheltered at her sister's house, which was located near Thursday's strike.
"We were displaced from the north and came here as they [the Israeli military] said it is safe," said Abu Oun, speaking at the hospital where the dead and wounded were taken.
"I wish we were martyred there [in northern Gaza] and didn't come here."
Residents said on Friday that many houses were hit overnight in the Nuseirat and Maghazi refugee camps, and that heavy fighting took place in Bureij in central Gaza. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah said it received the bodies of 40 people, including 28 women, who were killed in strikes.
"They are hitting everywhere," said Saeed Moustafa, a Palestinian man from Nuseirat. "Families are killed inside their homes and the streets. They are killed everywhere."

And heaven forfend awkward cartoons ... showing same as it ever was ... same as it ever was ...