In which there can be only one winner, so there must be a few consolation prizes ...

 

The pond supposes that the idea of a hunger games was a good one, at least when the pond started out. 

But then blogger decided to bung on a do, and in any case, what to do when there's a full gathering of the reptiles, with pets and faves in abundance?

At least there was one below the fold who could be dispensed with quickly ...

Yes, back in the day, the idea of a "Ramesh Thakur" railing at diversity, equity and inclusion would have been laughed at ...

The pond well remembers the fate of a certain Robert Borel de Bitche, who once hung around the UNE campus giving himself lordly Belgian airs. 

The pond has no idea if he ended up hanging around Le Château de Ramezee - good luck to him if he did - but at the time the amount of idle abuse and mocking contempt for "the bitch" was astonishing to behold, even for the pond ...

Diversity and inclusion? Forgeddid ...

Poor old emeritus Ramesh, back in the day, would have found notions of inclusion handy ... but instead he seems to have swallowed the reptile dictionary whole ...

This is a crisis of university governance. First the parasitical administrators took over the university, with their numbers and salaries increasing disproportionately. Then the wokerati took over the administration by a successful coup via DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion); DIE (division, intolerance, exclusion) is a more accurate description. The result is the sickening obfuscation on full display last week, cloaked in a veneer of superior moral sensibility.

Wokerati! 

DIE enemy No.1 is white males. DIE has shoehorned Jews into white supremacist oppressors and colonisers. Can Jews be colonisers of their own ancestral land that is also intimately woven into their core religious texts?

Indeed, indeed, can Australians be colonisers when tales of prison hulks are woven into their national song?

Anti-Semitism is being normalised in Western societies, thanks to the malignant spread of DIE toxicity through and by universities. Elite universities that used to be the crown jewels in the US soft power have been corrupted into institutions pushing political agendas downstream of culture wars. The share of young adults who rate a college degree highly fell from 74 per cent in 2013 to 41 in 2019; 61 per cent of Americans believe higher education is going in the wrong direction.

And so on and on, and then the twig dropped when the pond got to this ...

Ramesh Thakur is emeritus professor at the ANU. He was chair of the United Nations university’s appointment committee from 1998 to 2007.

Yes, the cunning emeritus Ramesh was one of the very same wokerati 'leets he was railing at, suddenly turned, a Jekyll or a Hyde, the pond can never remember the one with the cane, like a mad uncle Elon down from the attic ...

With the greatest respect, the pond is deeply into the reptile stew and so into division, intolerance and exclusion, and so there's simply no way emeritus Ramesh can find a place in the pond. That talk of peace, nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament is simply intolerable ...

Instead please allow the pond to check out what proper, certified correct ethnic groups have been up to this day, and lordy lordy, it was tyke manna from heaven ...

And there you can see the pond's dilemma. Not only was there a dinkum groaning - as good as any a way to show diversity and tolerance for white wymn - but the bromancer was cheek by jowl with his great buddie the onion muncher.

How could the pond pretend there was a contest? The onion muncher was automatically the winner, it was a given, even without the intrinsic absurdity of the misleading headline ...

Yet how could the pond be so cruel as to maltreat the bro and the groaning?

And so today the pond was forced to abandon the hunger games, with just one minnow rabbiting on about the wokerati excluded for the sake of exclusion ...

First up came the bro ...

That's a lie of course ...there are cracks all over the place, what with even Biden warning Israel that it's losing support ...

But the pond finds it bracing to begin the day with a bro lie, aka devious misrepresentation ...

At this point the reptiles started slipping in snaps, culminating with the dire spectacle of a tremendously terrifying greenie ...

Meanwhile, on another planet ... Mark Mazzetti and Ronen Bergman in the NY Times, 'Buying Quiet': Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas, with the lede Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled that a strong Hamas (but not too strong) would keep the peace and reduce pressure for a Palestinian state (sorry, it's long but there's a paywall).

Just weeks before Hamas launched the deadly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the head of Mossad arrived in Doha, Qatar, for a meeting with Qatari officials.

For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.

During his meetings in September with the Qatari officials, according to several people familiar with the secret discussions, the Mossad chief, David Barnea, was asked a question that had not been on the agenda: Did Israel want the payments to continue?

Mr. Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy, so Mr. Barnea said yes. The Israeli government still welcomed the money from Doha.

Allowing the payments — billions of dollars over roughly a decade — was a gamble by Mr. Netanyahu that a steady flow of money would maintain peace in Gaza, the eventual launching point of the Oct. 7 attacks, and keep Hamas focused on governing, not fighting.

The Qatari payments, while ostensibly a secret, have been widely known and discussed in the Israeli news media for years. Mr. Netanyahu’s critics disparage them as part of a strategy of “buying quiet,” and the policy is in the middle of a ruthless reassessment following the attacks. Mr. Netanyahu has lashed back at that criticism, calling the suggestion that he tried to empower Hamas “ridiculous.”

In interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli, American and Qatari officials, and officials from other Middle Eastern governments, The New York Times unearthed new details about the origins of the policy, the controversies that erupted inside the Israeli government and the lengths that Mr. Netanyahu went to in order to shield the Qataris from criticism and keep the money flowing.

The payments were part of a string of decisions by Israeli political leaders, military officers and intelligence officials — all based on the fundamentally flawed assessment that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of a large-scale attack. The Times has previously reported on intelligence failures and other faulty assumptions that preceded the attacks.

Even as the Israeli military obtained battle plans for a Hamas invasion and analysts observed significant terrorism exercises just over the border in Gaza, the payments continued. For years, Israeli intelligence officers even escorted a Qatari official into Gaza, where he doled out money from suitcases filled with millions of dollars.

The money from Qatar had humanitarian goals like paying government salaries in Gaza and buying fuel to keep a power plant running. But Israeli intelligence officials now believe that the money had a role in the success of the Oct. 7 attacks, if only because the donations allowed Hamas to divert some of its own budget toward military operations. Separately, Israeli intelligence has long assessed that Qatar uses other channels to secretly fund Hamas’ military wing, an accusation that Qatar’s government has denied.

“Any attempt to cast a shadow of uncertainty about the civilian and humanitarian nature of Qatar’s contributions and their positive impact is baseless,” a Qatari official said in a statement.

Multiple Israeli governments enabled money to go to Gaza for humanitarian reasons, not to strengthen Hamas, an official in Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. He added: “Prime Minister Netanyahu acted to weaken Hamas significantly. He led three powerful military operations against Hamas which killed thousands of terrorists and senior Hamas commanders.”

Hamas has always publicly stated its commitment to eliminating the state of Israel. But each payout was a testament to the Israeli government’s view that Hamas was a low-level nuisance, and even a political asset.

As far back as December 2012, Mr. Netanyahu told the prominent Israeli journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Mr. Margalit, in an interview, said that Mr. Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.

The official in the prime minister’s office said Mr. Netanyahu never made this statement. But the prime minister would articulate this idea to others over the years.

While Israeli military and intelligence leaders have acknowledged failings leading up to the Hamas attack, Mr. Netanyahu has refused to address such questions. And with a war waging in Gaza, a political reckoning for the man who has served as prime minister for 13 of the last 15 years, is, for the moment, on hold.

But Mr. Netanyahu’s critics say that his approach to Hamas had, at its core, a cynical political agenda: to keep Gaza quiet as a means of staying in office without addressing the threat of Hamas or simmering Palestinian discontent.

“The conception of Netanyahu over a decade and a half was that if we buy quiet and pretend the problem isn’t there, we can wait it out and it will fade away,” said Eyal Hulata, Israel’s national security adviser from July 2021 until the beginning of this year.

As noted, it's a story that went on at great length, but there were some more nuggets, especially this one ...

Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who is now Mr. Netanyahu’s finance minister, put it bluntly in 2015, the year he was elected to Parliament.

“The Palestinian Authority is a burden,” he said. “Hamas is an asset.”

Some asset. And then there was this one ...

“For Netanyahu, there is only one thing that is really important: to be in power at any cost,” he said. “To stay in power, he preferred to pay for tranquillity.”

Suitcases filled with cash soon began crossing the border into Gaza.

Each month, Israeli security officials met Mohammed al-Emadi, a Qatari diplomat, at the border between Israel and Jordan. From there, they drove him to the Kerem Shalom border crossing and into Gaza.

At first, Mr. Emadi brought with him $15 million to distribute, with $100 handed out at designated locations to each family approved by the Israeli government, according to former Israeli and American officials.

The funds were intended to pay salaries and other expenses, but one senior Western diplomat who was based in Israel until last year said that Western governments had long assessed that Hamas was skimming from the cash disbursements.

“Money is fungible,” said Chip Usher, a senior Middle East analyst at the C.I.A. until his retirement this year. “Anything that Hamas didn’t have to use out of its own budget freed up money for other things.”

Naftali Bennett, who was Israel’s education minister in 2018 when the payments began and later became the defense minister, was among members of Mr. Netanyahu’s government who criticized the payments. He called them “protection money.”

And yet, when Mr. Bennett began his one-year stint as prime minister in June 2021, he continued the policy. By then, Qatar was spending roughly $30 million a month in Gaza.

Does any of this get noted by the bromancer? The deep well of corruption? Of course not ...

That's a pretty tragic and dire misrepresentation of the situation, but then the bro is notoriously given to misrepresentation ...

Meanwhile, in another country, this time in the Graudian ... here ...

And there was this in the Graudian too ...

Does the bro feel any shame standing with a notoriously corrupt, and deeply corrupting, war criminal?

Of course not ... he's got only one form of tawdry electoral politics in mind ...

But speaking of tawdry electoral politics, please allow the pond to finish off that Graudian read ...

And now the pond supposes it should show a little tolerance and inclusivity, and hear from the token womyn in the reptile pack.

Much time has been wasted with the bro, but take heart, the onion muncher is coming, and Dame Groan's groan is relatively short ...

It goes without saying that there's nothing that Jimbo could say or do that would stop the Groaner from indulging in an epic groan, and the pond is here to help with the infallible Pope of the day ...

That's the right Xmas spirit, but does it please the Groaner? Bah, humbug ...

At this point, the reptiles slipped in a snap of Jimbo himself ...

The pond thought this Wilcox might help a little more ...

Thanks for playing, and this is the final gobbet of groaning ...

The day that Jimbo scores top marks from Dame Groan is likely the day when hell, or at least earth, freezes over ...

A final Wilcox before the pond turns to the pre-ordained winner?

The pond suspects that Kudelka would second that ...

And speaking of a profound sense of entitlement,  now on to what every decent, dinkum cultist has been waiting for. 

The oracle himself, the man who made constant attention-seeking narcissism a national virtue ...

Not to mention the complete Talibanisation of Texas and the GOP and great swathes of the United States...

... and a judicial system that's inclined to be deeply suspect, and not just the doubting Thomas and SCOTUS ...

Sorry, the pond means no disrespect, but the sight of the onion muncher in full cry always sends the pond scurrying off to the cartoonists ...

Speaking of the bad versus the worst, as the worst PM in recent times, this man knows whereof he speaks ...

To help with the jokes, the reptiles followed up that snap of Ronnie Raygun and Margie having a chuckle with a shot of a man holding a koala bear - oh the poor bear - and a snap of Rish!

Here the pond should pause to ask if everyone has read Tories are too busy locked in a narcissistic death spiral to spare a thought for us...

Look the part. Fake it to make it. So there were huge cheers as Rish! entered the chamber for the last prime minister’s questions of the year. It was all most confusing. What was all the noise for? For having not been the first prime minister since Margaret Thatcher in 1986 to lose a bill at second reading? For having come up with a Rwanda plan that was so vicious, so deranged, that only a psychopathic idiot could have come up with it? Imagine being able to choose your own reality.

Weirdly, Rish! seemed to find it all perfectly normal. His arrogance and blinkered life experience have encouraged him to confuse irony for sincerity. The cheers were no more than he expected. At last, MPs were beginning to express their gratitude for all he had done. So he bounced up and down excitedly. He was a Winner! He would still be PM by the end of the year! 2024 might never happen! The polls showing him to be less popular than Johnson? He was right on track.

It's why PMQs should be watched, just to enjoy the reporting all the more.

Oh, and back with the reptiles, there was also a snap of a rodent ...

Moving right along, because the reptiles will never get tired of their hagiographical ways - the only surprise was that Ming the merciless was missing - there was another gobbet of distilled essence of delight ...

What he meant to say of course was that we're supposed to feel nostalgic for the onion muncher, sent to wander the world, chumming up with despots, authoritarians and weirdos, and far right tanks (the pond thought it unwise to use the word "think") ...

Ah, the good old litany. Always works. Run them off the tongue trippingly.

Ah good old climate change, though alas the onion muncher had a minor loss this week ... per the Graudian ...

... and the NY Times ...

The pond just wanted to place those splashes on the record, because the reptiles gave the story the big freeze ...

Speaking of climate chance, as one often does when there's an onion muncher flapping in the breeze, the pond was amazed to read in USA Today The weather is getting cold. Global warming is still making weather weird...

The pond's main memory of USA Today was that it was the middlebrow, tending to conservative rag that got left at the motel room door along with what passed for a motel breakfast in America ...and yet suddenly it was full of heresy ...

On the coldest days, Francis Tarasiewicz dons long johns, sweat pants, snow pants, hooded jackets, outerwear jackets, a scarf, gloves, mittens and goggles to make the trek a few hundred feet outdoors to the Mount Washington Observatory’s precipitation station.

When winds blow hardest at the 6,288-foot summit, New Hampshire's tallest peak, the trip takes up to 20 minutes and makes the flapping of his hood sound like a chainsaw.

Braving such harsh conditions, Tarasiewicz – a weather observer and education specialist at the observatory, a nonprofit research institution – and his colleagues have documented a year of crazy extremes on the mountain in 2023, with wild swings in rain, snow and temperatures.

Like thousands of researchers around the globe, they're compiling increasing evidence that climate change is bringing weirder weather, even in frigid locations like this northeastern landmark.

Notoriously fickle, the world's weather is lurching from one extreme to another more often and to a greater degree as the warming atmosphere pushes natural variability to new extremes, breaking records time and again, the researchers say.

These extremes in wilder weather – intense downpours, record heat waves and more – are “one of the most direct ways” people experience climate change, said the latest National Climate Assessment, rolled out by the federal government in late November.

"People are experiencing climate change right now, right outside their windows, especially through the impacts of extreme weather events," said Allison Crimmins, director of this fifth national assessment.

Human-induced climate change alters the intensity, frequency and duration of many extreme events during every season of the year, according to the report. Drought, flooding and wildfire are becoming more frequent and severe, with cascading effects in every part of the country.

Globally, scientists expect such events to worsen and to occur more frequently without greater and more urgent reductions in fossil fuel emissions.

Sheesh, what's all this talk of actual scientists doing actual field research?

The onion muncher travels the world and notes the weather, and surely that qualifies as field research, though admittedly he finds the best observations come looking out hotel windows ...and yet ...

...The broken records and abrupt shifts in extremes this year are "signatures of warming" that have "hugely consequential" impacts, he said. “It’s something that I think we’re now starting to see in everything that’s unfolding all around us."

The biggest wild swings are in rainfall and drought, Swain said. The swings are driven by the effect of warming on the hydrologic cycle, one reason he refers to it as precipitation whiplash.

Others use terms such as "global weirding," "weather weirding" and "weather whiplash" to describe how warming increasingly influences extreme swings in weather and climate.

With every increment of warmer temperatures, the atmosphere holds more water vapor that can fall as rain or snow, exacerbating extreme precipitation events.

That ability to hold water vapor increases exponentially as the temperature warms, changing much faster than the temperatures themselves, Swain said. Evaporation rates also increase as temperatures warm, which pulls more water from plants and soil and makes droughts more intense.

In page after page, the climate assessment spells out how warming temperatures cause the fluctuating extremes. Additional warming means more water vapor, more drought and more instability. Those impacts, in turn, cause more damage, greater losses, and increasing the risk of catastrophic consequences.

The number of hot days is projected to increase exponentially if temperatures continue to soar. Warmer temperatures and marine heat waves further expand the oceans, adding to rising sea levels along with the flow from melting glaciers. The assessment states sea levels are expected to further increase the number of coastal flooding events that disrupt lives in coastal communities, like the king tides that struck around the country in November.

The risk of two or more extreme events – known as compound events – occurring simultaneously or in quick succession in the same region also is increasing, said L. Ruby Leung, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and lead author of the federal climate assessment's earth sciences chapter.

Such compound events can cause cascading failures that threaten livelihoods, especially harming farmers and fishers, the report said. For example, disastrous combinations of warmer waters, drought and heavy runoff from extreme rains have triggered harmful algal blooms and contributed to mass die-offs of fish and shellfish in coastal regions.

Even extremes in different locations can be connected by complex natural systems, Leung said, for example the Canadian wildfires that blanketed residents across the northern U.S. in hazy acrid smoke over the summer.

Wild shifts in extremes have been seen around the world this year, not just on Mount Washington. They include:

• California flipped from extreme drought to a stream of relentless atmospheric rivers. It had one of the snowiest seasons in decades in the Sierra.
• Phoenix and Houston set records for consecutive days of extreme high temperatures.
• A World Meteorological Organization committee is examining whether Freddy, a tropical cyclone in the South Indian Ocean over the summer, was the longest lasting tropical cyclone on record.
• Greece went from its worst wildfire season on record immediately to unprecedented flooding last summer.
• In Fort Lauderdale, a sudden downpour dropped an unexpected 2 feet of rain, up to 20 inches of that in just six hours.

The Fort Lauderdale rain was “unbelievable,” said Steve Bowen, chief science officer and meteorologist with Gallagher Re, a global reinsurance broker. A similar heavy rainfall occurred in the city in November, at the same time as a seasonal high tide.

The dramatic weather fluxes occurring more often are leaving people and their insurance companies increasingly exposed, Bowen said.

And so on and on, and so to a final reassuring gobbet, from a man who has relentlessly failed upwards at everything he's attempted ... so that now he's not just a local bore, he's a worldwide bore ...

Meanwhile, the pond can dimly remember the onion muncher mentioning renewed Russian militarism ...

Thankfully, on another planet the GOP and the onion muncher's tanks know how to deal with that threat ...