In which our Henry forces the pond to bring back a few graphics, and so does the alarmist lizard Oz editorialist ...

 

The pond had to abandon its strict anti-visual summer lizard Oz herpetology school stance, if only to explain why the pond had red-carded the grave Sexton ...

No matter how the reptiles try to slip the Lehrmann matter past the pond, the pond will not be gulled, so it was red card time for the grave Sexton ...

Milner minor from the deep north didn't even rise to the level of a banning, but the pond sadly had to let go the meretricious Merritt, briefly at the top of the pack yesterdat ...

The pond is always ready to discover the delicious dimpled delight of the dawn-drawn falcon of alliteration, but "Compo for communists" raised serious issues. It seems that the reptiles have fallen prey to the new fashion of abandoning capital letters, which is a capitol (legislative) cause for complaint ...

Using lower case when talking about communists places the term down with other uses like socialist, or liberal, or woke. 

It seems the meretricious Merritt was complaining about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and never mind that any connection to communism was long ago lost in the Xi dictatorship, emulating Mao's autocracy ...

The pond would have settled for Compo for Dictatorship Swine, in lieu of Commie Swine, while dinkum decent Aussie innocent virginal coal lovers go begging ...

Meanwhile, it's Friday and our Henry is on hand to delight ... and so the pond can revert back to text ..

Fifty years on, a warning the West still needs to heed

The pond immediately regretted its decision because it was followed by what the pond took as grand news. 

The return of the lizard Oz graphics department ...

Caricature by artist Eric Lobbecke of 1970 Nobel Prize winning writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, trudging through the snow and coming across former Soviet symbol in blood.

Sure enough, there was a genuine example of the master at work ...

And thereby hangs a tale ... but first the byline ...

By henry ergas
12:00AM January 5, 2024

And a first gobbet of our Henry ...

Fifty years ago last week, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was released in Paris. Far more than simply an account of the Soviet prison camps, Solzhenitsyn’s work still stands both as an extraordinary testimony about the past and as a stark warning for the present.
Like all of Solzhenitsyn’s prodigious output, the questions at its heart echo those Leo Tolstoy posed in War and Peace: “What does it all mean? Why did it happen? What made these people kill their own kind?”
And it is precisely because Solzhenitsyn focused on those questions that The Gulag Archipelago is not merely a searing indictment of Soviet communism but a work of moral analysis.
The proximate cause of the horrors it portrays was, no doubt, the Bolshevik regime that came to power in 1917. Yet the Bolsheviks’ murderous mindset did not emerge from thin air. Rather, it was the outcome of the philosophy that gained absolute sway over the “progressive” Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century. Epitomised by Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? (1863), which Lenin considered a masterpiece, that philosophy rejected the notions of free will, human nature and personal responsibility, instead asserting that people’s behaviour depended entirely on their circumstances.
Having deduced from that proposition the complete malleability of human beings, Chernyshevsky concluded that the perfect society could be built on earth – so long as the elite that grasped philosophical materialism’s “scientific conclusions” had the grim determination re-engineering humanity required.

At this point the reptiles slipped in a snap, followed a little later on by another, an actual dinkum caricature, and the pond's heart began to pound ... could this be the return of a graphics dream, endless days of reptile graphics delights? 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And so to the beginning of that other tale ...

You see that snap of Sol turned up in the lizard Oz some time ago ... and while it was a landscape framing, as opposed to a vertical one, more snake than 4:3, it was recognisably the same, and so was the topic ...

The pond was tempted at this point to talk of apartheid and the Gaza gulag and ethnic cleansing and collective punishment, but instead decided to head back to our Henry for another gobbet ...

Chernyshevsky’s reasoning, which became an integral part of Soviet Marxism’s dogma, left no room for any transcendental morality. The contention that some actions could be absolutely right or wrong, was, said Lenin, “moralising vomit”; all that mattered was their results. And since “there can be no middle course” between communism and reaction, “nothing, however vile, should be condemned that (advances) the working people’s struggle against the exploiters”.
Seen within that prism of Manichean logic, incarcerating and even executing those who might undermine “the struggle against the exploiters” was more than justifiable: it was, regardless of their actual conduct, an obligation. So when Dmitri Kursky was formulating the new Soviet legal code, Lenin cautioned him that “the law should not abolish terror; it should be legalised, without evasion or embellishment”.
The code therefore treated potential crime as crime, extending culpability to “(1) the guilty, (2) persons under suspicion and (3) persons potentially under suspicion”, with NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov’s infamous Order No.00486 specifying that the wives of “traitors of the motherland” were to be sentenced to forced labour, and even their children, who might wish to take revenge, were to be imprisoned.
The goal of mercilessly “hanging bloodsuckers” was, wrote Lenin, to ensure “that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble and cry: they are and will go on killing”. But that, explained Lenin’s close associate, Nikolai Bukharin, was not terror’s only objective: “Proletarian compulsion, beginning with shootings and ending with labour conscription, is a method of producing a communist humankind out of the detritus of the capitalist era”:

At this point the reptiles slipped in a media link

Media-link
'Crisis of public morality': Western societies 'under assault from within'

... while our Henry concluded without a slip:

millions of inmates were to be “moulded into a new type of human being”.

Now for once the pond could agree. 

Many western societies are under assault from within by the Chairman Emeritus, his spawn, and associated bodies, from Faux Noise to News Corp ... and there seems to be no way to end the never-ending assault ...

(Bulwark)

But back to Morison's grim 2023 tale, and as well as showing off that caricature, later to slouch towards our Henry early in 2024 ...

... there seemed to be an unnerving similarity in topic and theme and style, with Morison covering the same turf ... and even worse, there came a graphics sting in the tale ...

So there you go, and there it was way back in 2023, and the pond's expectations - dreams, desires, hope beyond hope - of a return of the grand old days of the lizard Oz graphics department had been a chimera ... a delusion ...

It had just been a cheap, cynical recycling of ancient graphics department offerings ... even the descriptive text was the same, as if an image needed a reptile 'splainin' ...

And speaking of recycling, there was also the unnerving similarity not just of illustration, but of theme between Morison and our Henry, with the hole in the bucket man rabbiting on thusly ...

There was, however, a fundamental problem with this attempt to play God: even under the most horrifying conditions, its victims might resist its delusions of omnipotence. At some point, Solzhenitsyn observes, every prisoner faced a choice: should one “survive at any price”, that is, “at the price of someone else”? “There lies the great fork of camp life. The roads go right and left: to the right – you lose your life; to the left – your conscience.”
Reality thereby put Marxism’s claim that it could secure the “total surrender of our souls” to the ultimate test – and more often than one might have imagined, when utterly powerless convicts had “to declare the great Yes or the great No”, the claim failed.
Never did it fail more frequently than with people of faith, who were largely the humble of this earth. Like the self-effacing Alyosha, the gentle Baptist in Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, they were the ones with the moral courage to choose the path of truth over that of living a lie.
And while the regime’s pre-eminent intellectuals “all too often turned out to be cowards, quick to surrender, and, thanks to their education, disgustingly ingenious in justifying their dirty tricks”, ordinary “zeks” (as the convicts were known) led mass rebellions, which Solzhenitsyn scrupulously documented, for the first time, in The Gulag Archipelago’s magnificent third volume.
But there is, Solzhenitsyn well knew, “this terrible strength of man, his desire and ability to forget”; and he also knew that “a people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul”. He therefore dedicated The Gulag Archipelago, as record, tribute and threnody, to “those who did not live to tell it: and may they please forgive me for not having remembered it all”.
That is why Solzhenitsyn would have been appalled by the Putin regime’s whitewashing of Soviet history, which culminated late last year in the unveiling of a monument to Felix Dzerjinski, the founder of Lenin’s secret police and of the Gulag, who Solzhenitsyn branded a mass murderer.
The duty of bearing witness also impelled Solzhenitsyn’s stark warnings to the West. To say he despised the West is nonsense. It was because he valued it so highly that he feared for its condition.

This was the point where the reptiles offered up that Solzhenitsyn caricature to give our Henry a chance to take a breath.

Well, the pond is using text and screen cap to distinguish between our Henry and Morison, so it's hardly worth nothing that this is another Morison gobbet from 2023 ...

The pond can also report that our Henry missed out on one illustration deployed in 2023 ...

And so to a final gobbet from our Henry, with the pond by now thoroughly unnerved ...

The fact that so many of its “leading thinkers (are) against capitalism”; that “under the influence of public opinion, the Western powers (have) yielded position after position”, hoping “that their agreeable state of general tranquillity might continue”; the supineness to “brutally dictatorial” China; the intelligentsia’s “fierce defence of terrorists”, “greater concern for terrorists’ rights than for victims’ justice” and habit of calling terrorists “militants” – all these were symptoms of calamitous moral decay.
That “fashionable ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and without ever being forbidden, have little chance of being heard in colleges”, only made the rot deeper and more pervasive.
Little wonder that Solzhenitsyn, having expressed those views, was savaged for ignoring America’s “vibrantly pluralistic society”, with The New York Times ridiculing his reminder that moral relativism leads to moral oblivion as the ravings of a “religious enthusiast”. And little wonder today’s Australian students are far less likely to have read Solzhenitsyn than to have poured over the idiotic scribblings of Leninism’s contemporary epigones.
Yes, Solzhenitsyn had his failings. But five decades after The Gulag Archipelago’s publication, the verdict of that other brilliant Russian Nobel laureate, Iosif Brodsky, who disagreed with Solzhenitsyn on many things, fully retains its validity.
“It is possible that two thousand years from now reading The Gulag will provide the same insight as reading the Iliad does today,” Brodsky wrote. “But if we do not read The Gulag today, there may, much sooner than two thousand years hence, be no one left to read either.”

Perhaps the major difference between our Henry's offering and that of Morison's - unfortunately the taste for platitudes is a shared one - comes from Morison's inability to match our Henry in pompous, portentous catastrophism, what with preferring a final reference to Xianity over the Iliad ... making the pond wonder if our Henry was really more interested in a strapping Spartan body than in Jesus ...

And there you have it, the amazing enough story of a story's rebirth, or at least the temporary rebirth of the lizard Oz's graphics department, cruelly snatched away like a mother's life in Texas ...

The pond then only had a short offering, a burst of alarmism and catastrophism from the lizard Oz editorialist ...

Too few workers threatens to short-circuit green transition

There was good news however, with the infallible Pope returning to spread joy to the world ...

It's astonishing how many ways the reptiles manage to be alarmed about renewables, in the guise of expressing deep concern, though the pond has to say it was more alarmed by a recent visual essay in WaPo ...

It's no doubt within the paywall, but here's a taster ...

Yep, there's some serious rapid change going down ... and meanwhile on another planet ...

By Editorial
12:00AM January 5, 2024

Always with the whining and the moaning ...

A shortage of qualified electricians has emerged as another significant obstacle to the Albanese government’s plans to quickly remake the nation’s energy system to combat climate change. Electrification of everything is touted as an essential part of the drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is why households are being told they must forgo gas cooktops and heating, and why drivers are being encouraged to buy expensive battery-powered electric vehicles.
Heavy industry is looking for ways to switch energy-hungry processes from gas to electricity where possible as well. But, like other areas of the energy transition, where infrastructure projects are taking longer and costing more than envisaged, the reality is proving to be somewhat different to the ambition. Highly skilled new workers are an essential part of the equation. But, as we report on Friday, a key Labor initiative to train the next generation of clean-energy technicians has filled fewer than 18 per cent the of available spaces.
The shortfall exacerbates a crippling workforce shortage that threatens to derail the nation’s transition to renewables. The Electrical Trades Union has warned that the sector needs an additional 32,000 electricians to help rewire the nation by 2030, or an extra 20,000 apprentices a year for the next three years based on current completion rates, representing a 240 per cent increase.

The pond had hoped to put this sort of reptile moaning to bed with the odd whack or two from a shovel...

(It could be found as a gif if you don't mind visiting Facebook).

Meanwhile, the lizard Oz editorialist was still rabbiting on in a state of sublime panic...

The reality is that the shortage of qualified electricians will take a long time to fix. The trade is one of the top three for shortages now, and just 1900 completed training in the June quarter, a couple of hundred up on the last corresponding figure pre-pandemic.
Skills Minister Brendan O’Connor is echoing the commonwealth workforce planning agency, Jobs and Skills Australia, in calling for more women to be employed as electricians. Just 2 per cent of electricians are women. But this assumes the reasons young men find electrical apprenticeships unattractive do not apply to women. They do – low wages, the quality of courses and the time it takes to qualify are gender-neutral. Addressing them will take time; electrician qualifications are part of a complete redesign of how trades are taught, commissioned by the commonwealth and states. Problems cited are courses that “stifle innovation and flexibility” in teaching and learning, and that make upskilling and reskilling slow.
For now, and years to come, we will face shortages of qualified electricians – which will slow projects down and create risks. Importing more skilled workers from overseas may be part of the solution. Mr O’Connor said he would resort to importing workers with the necessary skills – if they were not being trained domestically – through targeted skilled migration. But this can also have its problems, aside from the growing community resistance to higher levels of immigration. In NSW last year there was industry uproar over training providers accrediting migrants as electricians on the basis of recognised prior learning, demonstrated by people supplying videos of their doing basic work.

The pond was tempted to note more pressing issues ...speaking, as the lizard Oz editorialist is, of impending risks ...

Instead the pond wondered why it kept on being haunted by recurring nightmares of returning fossils, usually to be found littering the lizard Oz and cartoons ...

Not to worry, a final short burst of panic from the lizard Oz editorialist ...

But the shortage of suitably qualified electricians is a significant national problem. It will certainly make the hoped-for renewable energy transition more difficult and more expensive. But it will also add to inflationary pressures throughout the economy and make the federal government’s other key policy priority areas, including building more affordable housing, more difficult and more expensive as well. It is further evidence of the unintended consequences of a command system where setting a bureaucratic target is too far divorced from having a proper plan of how to get there.

... featuring a bunch of pious crocodile tears and much prayer and anxious, troubled reptilian paws lifted to the sky, as if this bunch of climate denialists gave a FF about the climate science known only to them as a religion or an ideology ...

And with all that done, it was time to relax with a few cartoons ...

Firstly, as the pond happened to mention Texas, one from Luckovich ... (and if you want an explanation, read Slate)

... and another from Le Lievre, who can be found these days at the AFR ...

Okay, okay, the pond is slowly shaking off the slough of summer school, but it's really all the fault of the hole in the bucket man ...