In which there's a clear winner in the pond's inaugural Xmas silly season reptile hunger games ...

 

Let day 1 of the reptile hunger games begin, with an immediate distraction, relevant to a link offered by an esteemed correspondent ...Israelis aren't seeing the devastating pictures Australians see from the war in Gaza. They're watching a sanitised war.

...In terms of sheer numbers, rarely, if ever, has any country killed as many women and children as quickly as Israel is doing so today.
But Israelis are getting no sense of this. They are living in a bubble of sanitised news in which the Israeli Defense Forces is conducting a careful, clinical military operation in Gaza.
The Yedioth edition with the pictures of 50 Israelis came on a day that the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the situation in Gaza as apocalyptic.
Apocalypse, what apocalypse?

It turns out that having a fluid gender identity helps when writing about current events in Ukraine and Gaza, with Masha Gessen recently offered In the Shadow of the Holocaust in The New Yorker (paywall). 

Gessen has some fair credibility, having been given some status by Vlad the sociopath with Russia puts prominent Russian-US journalist Masha Gessen on wanted list for criminal charges ...

They had a lot to say about a lot of things, and they also dared to go there ...

...For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.
The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.
From the earliest days of Israel’s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away. In 1948, the year the state was created, an article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv described the dire conditions—“old people so weak they were on the verge of death”; “a boy with two paralyzed legs”; “another boy whose hands were severed”—in which Palestinians, mostly women and children, departed the village of Tantura after Israeli troops occupied it: “One woman carried her child in one arm and with the other hand she held her elderly mother. The latter couldn’t keep up the pace, she yelled and begged her daughter to slow down, but the daughter did not consent. Finally the old lady collapsed onto the road and couldn’t move. The daughter pulled out her hair … lest she not make it on time. And worse than this was the association to Jewish mothers and grandmothers who lagged this way on the roads under the crop of murderers.” The journalist caught himself. “There is obviously no room for such a comparison,” he wrote. “This fate—they brought upon themselves.”
Jews took up arms in 1948 to claim land that was offered to them by a United Nations decision to partition what had been British-controlled Palestine. The Palestinians, supported by surrounding Arab states, did not accept the partition and Israel’s declaration of independence. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan invaded the proto-Israeli state, starting what Israel now calls the War of Independence. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the fighting. Those who did not were driven out of their villages by Israeli forces. Most of them were never able to return. The Palestinians remember 1948 as the Nakba, a word that means “catastrophe” in Arabic, just as Shoah means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. That the comparison is unavoidable has compelled many Israelis to assert that, unlike the Jews, Palestinians brought their catastrophe on themselves.

The day I arrived in Kyiv, someone handed me a thick book. It was the first academic study of Stepan Bandera to be published in Ukraine. Bandera is a Ukrainian hero: he fought against the Soviet regime; dozens of monuments to him have appeared since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. He ended up in Germany after the Second World War, led a partisan movement from exile, and died after being poisoned by a K.G.B. agent, in 1959. Bandera was also a committed fascist, an ideologue who wanted to build a totalitarian regime. These facts are detailed in the book, which has sold about twelve hundred copies. (Many bookstores have refused to carry it.) Russia makes gleeful use of Ukraine’s Bandera cult as evidence that Ukraine is a Nazi state. Ukrainians mostly respond by whitewashing Bandera’s legacy. It is ever so hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea that someone could have been the enemy of your enemy and yet not a benevolent force. A victim and also a perpetrator. Or vice versa.

Thanks to the reptile hunger games - not the same as the current hunger games on view in the collective punishment in Gaza - the pond has the room to feature some scribbling emanating from outside the reptile tent.

Now for the contenders ... and was immediately confronted with having to rule on eligibility. 

Before the great 6 am turnover, there was the Caterist, and a Killer outing, both as bold as reptile top brass ...

But at 6 am, they were disappeared, like pumpkins in a Cinderella tale, and a batch of others contenders were ushered in  ...

The pond decided that the Caterist and Killer could stay in contention, especially as the reptiles had decided that having Albo behind their paywall, as a way of luring shekels into the Chairman Emeritus's coffers, was somehow better than a Caterist and a Killer or even a pear tree ...

Sadly, while allowed to compete, the Caterist had to be immediately ruled out ... with a dismal effort celebrating recent events in fush and chups land, and signing off this way ...

The ambition is audacious: to restore the country’s former reputation as a world economic and social leader, to make a united New Zealand great again.
Nick Cater is senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.

MUNZGA? Pathetic, and a tad delusional, with disappointment certain for fush and chup folk.

As for Killer's Trump 2.0 might be a disaster, but it will not be a dictatorship, it was a noble attempt, and worthy of a consolation prize. 

Killer did his level best to be sunnyside up about the prospects of the mungo Mussolini's impending dictatorship, and so deserved a text version, if not full caps:

Last week Donald Trump twice declined to say he would not abuse power if he were re-elected president.
Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, one of Trump’s biggest media backers, gave the former president the opportunity to dismiss his critics’ claims that he would be a “dictator”.
“Do you have any plans whatsoever if re-elected to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?” Hannity asked him on Thursday.
Trump didn’t answer and changed the subject. Flabbergasted, Hannity asked the question again after a commercial break. This time Trump said he would be dictator only on “day one”.
Trump’s critics exaggerate the danger he poses to conventional US governance, but these were worrying, and politically inept, answers given the reservations many Americans have about the wisdom of a second Trump presidency. After all, Trump often declares himself to be the “retribution” candidate, promising to seek revenge on his perceived enemies within the federal government if re-elected.
That said, his critics have become hysterical as the former president tightens his grip on the Republican nomination and consistently bests Joe Biden in the polls.
Former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill recently said Trump was “more dangerous than Hitler and Mussolini”.
The Economist last month declared Trump posed the “biggest danger to the world in 2024”.
“Could a Trump presidency turn into a dictatorship?” asked Robert Kagan in The Washington Post earlier this month, one of many similar op-eds gracing the pages of major US newspapers in recent weeks.
High-profile anchor Rachel Maddow in October said Trump would “put MSNBC on trial for treason so he can execute us”. The Atlantic magazine has just published an entire issue on how a Trump presidency would be a disaster for the climate, LGBTQ rights, NATO, women and science, among other things. Republican Chris Christie, whose anti-Trump candidacy has so far failed, even blamed Trump for the rise of anti-Semitism across the US.
Mary Trump, the former president’s niece, said on CNN this weekend a second Trump term would spell “the end of American democracy”.
They all need to take a deep breath. A second Trump presidency might be a disaster, but it won’t be a dictatorship. Trump had four years to try to become a dictator and didn’t. Americans take their rigid rules-based constitution very seriously.
Power is highly decentralised across the three branches of government, and the 50 US states, which have their own constitutions and whose governors and police forces don’t answer to the president. (There’s also that small problem of more than 430 million guns in civilian hands, making any attempt to sustain a dictatorship more difficult.)
Most importantly, it’s unlikely the US military, fundamental to any successful coup, would go along with any dictatorship. Officers swear an oath of allegiance to the US constitution, promising to obey only presidential orders consistent with it.
Even Trump’s own choice for chairman of the joint chiefs, Mark Milley, recently said he would have thwarted any orders from President Trump to deploy the military domestically.
And no president is any match for the CIA and FBI, least of all Trump, who is largely loathed by those two powerful agencies. Indeed, Trump was too scared to release even the final JFK assassination files for fear of upsetting the CIA.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Democrat senator Chuck Schumer observed in 2017.
Finally, the events of January 6, 2021 showed the US constitution and conventional governance proved highly resilient to massive riots and White House pressure to delay the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Any warnings that Trump will become a dictator are not only ridiculous, but probably counter-productive for Trump’s opponents: the clear exaggerations only convince his supporters that the mainstream media is egregiously biased against him. Self-evidently, these attacks haven’t worked. Trump has been the favourite, currently overwhelmingly so, to become the next president in political betting markets since October.
Trump is known for his exaggeration, bravado and bluster, but few ordinary Americans take him literally, and his supporters know feigned shock when they see it.
To be sure, a second Trump presidency would not be a sedate affair, notwithstanding the possibility Trump could be sentenced to jail next year over any of his 91 indictments about to creep through the legal system.
For a start, Trump’s desire to significantly weaken the federal career civil service by ensuring all staff can be sacked by the White House (as opposed to only the most senior officials) could elicit mass strikes or lay-offs.
Trump is far from the ideal presidential candidate, but he has tapped into the widespread frustration of a large minority of Americans with the policies and style of the two major political parties.
That’s what he meant back in 2016 when he famously said he could shoot someone on 5th Ave in Manhattan and not lose any votes. The parties’ failure to produce a concentration of better, younger candidates has fuelled Trump’s political rise, and possible comeback.
There are many reasons to criticise Trump’s second bid for the White House: the failures from his first term, the excessive focus on himself, or a lack of policy detail (he floated abolishing so-called Obamacare last week without an alternative). But him becoming a dictator is not one of them. 

A noble effort and perhaps a winner if there hadn't bee a stronger contender this day, but at least Killer gave the pond a chance for the pond to throw to a Luckovich ...

It also gave the pond a chance to reference Michael Chessum in the LRB, It Can't Happen Here ...

...While the far right advances across Europe, the British cling to exceptionalism. Larry Elliot in the Guardian reassures readers that ‘the UK has not witnessed the rise of the nasty nationalism seen across the channel.’ Keir Starmer speaks of ‘fair play, respect for difference, the rule of law’. Suella Braverman last year lauded Britons as ‘fair-minded, tolerant and generous in spirit’. Three months later, she introduced the legislation that imposes lifetime bans on migrants who arrive irregularly, effectively withdrawing the UK from international refugee conventions. A clear majority of the public backed the policy. Yet the obsolete vision of Britain as a moderating influence against continental excess endures.
One of the arguments for Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system is that it supposedly locks out extremism. It’s true that proportional representation has made it easier for the PVV, and other European far-right parties, to gain an electoral foothold. But in order to govern they will need the support of the centre and centre-right, which should moderate much of their platform.
In the UK, this alliance is hardwired in the Conservative Party. David Cameron was the self-proclaimed ‘compassionate Conservative’ leader who, while imposing a brutal regime of austerity, legalised gay marriage and said that his proudest achievement was increasing the UK’s foreign aid budget. His return to the cabinet as foreign secretary last month was sold as a sop to the party’s liberal wing. But it also shows that, having tipped the Conservatives in the direction of border-building and authoritarianism, the leadership can expect the disciplined support of almost every ‘wet’, including Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton. As Braverman’s sacking and Jenrick’s resignation make clear, the fault lines are on the party’s right.
Most British liberals have confidence in our institutions to withstand the onward march of the far right. This is a sign of complacency, not inoculation. Now that right-wing nationalism has entered the mainstream, our political system acts to promote and normalise it. It is the captive of a mass media driven by the agendas of three billionaire families – the Murdochs, Rothermeres and Barclays – who between them own 70 per cent of our newspapers. Next year, the many British versions of Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen will be swept from office. But their policies and influence will linger. Short-term catharsis is no guarantee of long-term safety.

Meanwhile, in The Graudian Julianne Schultz offered Since colonial times Australia has been an incarceration nation where lock ’em up is preferred to rehabilitation:

Brunswick Heads is an idyllic town perched between a river and the sea near Byron Bay. It was once best known for its abundance of caravan parks and cheap fibro holiday houses. The houses now sell for millions, but the ethos remains.
A few weeks ago, an old piano materialised in the riverside Soundshell near the kids’ swings. Local people wondered who had put it there, but it soon became a source of delight, a sign that Brunz had joined the ranks of other faraway places with pianos in public places.
The local Facebook group erupted. Hundreds of people reported how much they enjoyed hearing the piano played as they prepared for a swim, how the presence of the piano had changed the vibe of the Soundshell from a dumping ground to a place of joy, how little kids brought up in an age of digital music loved touching the keys and learning how to tap out chopsticks.
Ah but … one or two argued, what about the risks. It was hard to imagine what risk a feral piano may present. But risk assessment has become something of a national preoccupation, and soon there were suggestions: it could lead to vandalism, it may fall on someone, what if sand got in the keys, who would be liable, and the big one, was it safe.
We have been hearing variations of this all year. Risk versus imagination, principle versus fear.
The reaction to the unanimous high court decision that people could not be held in indefinite detention on the whim of a minister was a classic example. At one level this was not remarkable. The high court upheld an application that had its roots in the foundational legal principle of habeas corpus. Arbitrary detention by the king, or his underlings, has been unlawful since the adoption of Magna Carta in Britain in 1215. As most constitutional experts agreed this decision had only been a matter of time.
But within days of the mandated release of refugee NZYQ, and others who had been held indefinitely in detention, the fearful mantra was repeated and amplified: who would keep us safe.
Even the minister quickly declared that if it were her choice, and she could do so legally, she would redetain them immediately. The words sounded no better coming from her mouth than they had centuries earlier when people deemed criminals were deported to the antipodean convict outposts for the term of their natural lives.
The search for ways of incarcerating “hardened criminals” could be defined as a national characteristic, remote islands and ankle restraints have proved enduringly popular...

The manager of one of the caravan parks saw it differently and a notice was stuck on the instrument’s burnished timber: “This piano has been illegally dumped … if you know the owner, ask them to collect it by Monday 4 December. If not collected it will be removed …”

That offering ended up with a rousing flourish ...

...Those with an imaginative scope might prefer to echo Timothy Garton Ash’s description: “Membership of a nation is defined in civic not ethnic terms … an open positive, warm-hearted nation is capable of appealing not only to dry reason, but the deep human need for belonging and the moral imperative of solidarity.”
It only took a couple of days to resolve the feral piano standoff in Brunswick Heads. The mayor reported on Monday that the piano would remain. Everyone agreed, he noted, that the piano added value. There were just a few issues to resolve, which would ensure “responsible use of this great asset”.
Within days a piano tuner had fixed the sticky F sharp, replaced a broken key and organised a concert. Imagination beat risk.
The piano didn’t need an ankle bracelet.

Is there an irony in this, coming from a colonial rag emanating from a country which got the whole prison hulk/export the convicts/black sheep thing going? Of course, but it's worth a cartoon ...

And so finally to today's reptile winner ...

it's that wily old stager, the famous old bird himself, Major Mitchell, who comes away with the caps honours this day ...

Look, there he is, perched in his favourite spot on the top far right ...

As any fuel would kno, the Major has long been one of the world's top climate scientists, with an impeccable publication history and beyond rock solid academic credentials, having graduated cum laude in the Murdochian University of Denialism (no defamation of Murdoch intended)... not to mention extensive field research, conducted behind a desk, or preferably from a leather chair, and he knos all the facts in the matter ... all the more important with that wretched reprehensible digging in over climate warming (as if there's such a thing) and still carrying on about ending fossil fuel use ...

Sic the Major on him, go get him Major, there's a good boy, there's a prize-winning boy ...

Some might be disappointed at the pond voting the wily old bird this day's winner.

Some will moan they've heard it all before from the Major, imitating a cracked record. And they'd be right but that's surely the essence of the reptile experience.

Some might observe that the wily old bird is just a hack, serving out time in the lizard Oz, regurgitating the usual tosh, still celebrating coal, not above thinking the Bjorn-again one is a credible source ... and they'd be right, but that's what makes herpetology so interesting.

Some might be more interested in other stories ...

Yes, there's that ABC story Mongolia's nomadic herders have lived off the land for centuries, but are now enduring the worst of climate change:

"When I was young, winter was cold and snowy, and during summer we had enough rain," says Damdinjav Sandag, Davaadorj's father, who's been a herder for all of his 70 years.

"Now winters have no snow or less snow, summers are overheated and there's little rain … grasses don't grow and because of this the animals don't get very fat."

Damdinjav followed in the footsteps of his ancestors and parents, who were herders, and has now passed the tradition on to three of his four children.

Over the course of his lifetime, he has become familiar with the land's shifting weather patterns.

Along with sandstorms, herders also experience dzuds, a distinctly Mongolian weather phenomenon, which refers to a harsh winter that follows a dry summer.

Sometimes known as a "white death" for their heavy blankets of snow, black dzuds are also becoming increasingly common.

During a black dzud, there is no snow, but livestock that haven't gained sufficient strength in the summer due to the drought still perish in the freezing temperatures.

When this happens, the family will pack a small camp and herd their livestock for hundreds of kilometres in search of kinder weather and better pastures.

There's a punchline:

Mongolia's climate is warming much faster than the global average, and has increased by more than 2C over the past 70 years.

Dzuds used to be a rare occurrence, with official declarations of the weather phenomenon happening about twice a decade, but now some provinces endure them every year.

The number of natural losses of adult livestock — which includes natural disasters, such as dzuds, heavy rain, fire, lightning as well as infectious and non-infectious diseases — reached 3.9 million in the first nine months of 2023, according to the National Statistical office of Mongolia.

And so on, but what does the Major know or care about Mongolian nomadic herders or their talk of dzuds and such like ...

The Major is delighted that fossil fools like him can keep on celebrating fossil fuels...

You can sense the Major's devotion to Al-Jaber, and naturally the reptiles followed up with a truly Satanic and frightening figure, terrifying to the readership ...

Luckily the Major was on hand to quiet the startled horses and the Mongolian nomads with an epic burst ...

The Major's concern for the uselessness of renewables, EVs and such like is rich in its poignancy, and the reptiles seized the chance to slip in a snap of a suffering German ...

... though perhaps not suffering quite as much as a Mongolian nomad in the grip of a black dzud ...

Still the Major ended with grim satisfaction. We would simply have to stick with coal and gas and the old ways ....

A resounding conclusion, quoting the Bjorn-again one in a way that no other reptile could top this day ...

It's a win for hidebound golden oldies, old farts content to cart bullshit from one hill to another ...

And now to end on a cheerful note, celebrating the Xian lifestyle ...

A correspondent offered this ... among many other lavish Xian mansions ...

And the pond would like to offer a bonus ...

It's a good solid business, and now's the time to get out and splurge, and celebrate the Xian lifestyle ...

And so to catch up on the weekend Kudelka, while looking forward to tomorrow's reptile hunger games. Will Dame Groan be the winner? Can anybody else stand the heat up against a fierce groaning? All will be revealed in due course ... assuming the old Groaner has the strength to get herself to the starting post ...