In which summer school continues, as the pond observes a weird reptile obsession but instead prefers quality time with the Lynch mob and climate science denialists ...

 

Meanwhile, the reptile silly season continues, and so therefore does the pond's summer school of reptile studies.

There's a thesis topic to hand for someone weird enough to take it on, and it involves the deeply weird, eternally abiding reptile obsession with Victorians (the local ones, not the ones that once ran the much loved, much reptile mourned lost empire) ...

 

"Experts"? The reptiles are now citing 'leets and experts, and even worse "experts warn"? Since when did the reptiles come to have any faith at all in experts?

The pond paused to spit on a griddle, thankful it wouldn't have to write up that thesis, before noting that the lizard Oz editorialist was blathering on about the same topic below the fold ...

Meanwhile, the pond was pondering bigger questions. 

Could this be the year that the chairman emeritus has his biggest triumph and helps instal an authoritarian, with dictatorial, not to mention not so crypto-fascist, white nationalist ambitions?

Judging by the latest news (paywall), the reptile love of the deeds of another wannabe authoritarian dictator anxious to avoid the clink suggests the odds are looking good ...

The lover of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment is pushing ahead, suggesting that there's every chance that his good buddy might also score a win ...

As further evidence, the pond cites the weird ramblings of the Lynch mob, offered as a space filler ...

What US sport can teach us about national pride

The best thing about summer school is that the pond doesn't have to bother with the illustrations, which are as deeply weird as the piece itself ...

Fans cheer as a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III conducts a flyover during the national anthem on opening day between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Arizona Diamondbacks at Dodger Stadium.

First the credit ...

By timothy lynch
5:00AM January 4, 2024

Then it was on with the Lynch mob, celebrating isolationism of a kind much preached by the mango Mussolini ...

My father-in-law died in August. Two months later, his beloved Texas Rangers won, for the first time, the baseball World Series. American sport was how I bonded with Don. It was also the source of our longest argument: why didn’t he take international sport seriously?
A man who never travelled abroad – he could count on two hands the number of American states he had visited – he had no time for international sport. The rivalries of the football (soccer) World Cup bemused him. Sweden vs. Brazil? Who cares? He told me he’d rather stab out his eyes with a spoon than watch “foreign kickball”.
He followed the Dallas Cowboys (American football), Dallas Mavericks (basketball), and the Oklahoma Sooners (college football) – he was born, raised and went to university in the neighbouring state. He was a somewhere man. He believed in place.
Don was unique in many ways. But he had a distrust of sport between nations that is enduringly American. While the US could dominate pretty much any sport it wanted, given its size and wealth, it has under-used team sport for nationalistic purposes.

Just as he was cranking into weird gear, the Lynch mob was interrupted by talk of complaining, whining womyn ...

Media-link
Matildas 'complaining' prize money not enough compared to men's world cup

The bloody harridans. The pond is reminded of Samuel Johnson's famous remark: "Sir, a woman playing soccer or any sport at all, is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all. The notion of paying womyn for the doing of it is entirely absurd. The idea of equal pay for womyn is completely far-fetched."

Well perhaps it wasn't quite in those words, but can the pond channel the reptile and the Lynch mob spirit or what?

Now back to the Lynch mob celebrating the sort of isolationism that might soon see the authoritarian mango Mussolini help the republic abandon its shambolic, derelict form of pseudo-democracy ...

The dullest clash in international football is the Three Lions vs. Team USA (see the 2010 and 2022 World Cups). Ancient enmities have not bred a sporting rivalry. England vs. Germany, on the other hand, is often titanic and dominates the English media for weeks (see 1966 and 1990). Ditto the Anglo-Argentina rivalry (see 1986 and 1998).
No one cares when Americans play international team sport.
Don, like so many of his fellow citizens, found something unAmerican in it. American nationalism does not need validation by beating foreigners on grass. English and Australian nationalisms do. The pinnacle of achievement for an English footballer is to play Germany or Argentina at the World Cup; for an Aussie batsman, to win the Ashes.
But an American baseball player? His goal is to win a “world” series in which teams from only two nations, Canada and the US, compete. An American football player has no foreign field on which to prove himself. When the NFL travels to Frankfurt or Wembley, the spectacle is bizarre. Some very odd non-Americans, in my experience, choose to follow US sports in preference to their own indigenous alternatives. They are almost as weird as people who love no sport at all.
The Ryder Cup is too infrequent and overhyped to count. It produces a confected nationalism against a non-nation: a team from Europe. The Olympics don’t count either. Americans took them seriously in the Cold War and invested in beating the USSR. Gold medals bolstered American nationalism. The end of the Cold War, however, led to a downgrading of the games in American eyes. The worst Olympics in history was held in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1996. They just stopped caring.

At this point the reptiles realised there was absolutely nothing in all this to pander to their elderly demographic, so they slipped in an appropriate ancient snap ...

The England Captain leads the team in a special cheer for Don Bradman, the Australian Captain, who is playing his last Test Match at the Oval in 1948.

Even the pond knows that today marks the appearance of an opening batsman playing his last game for Australia, but hand it to the reptiles. The ability to be out of touch, out of date, and out of mind might well help the USA revert to the sort of spectacular ratbag behaviour that marked the Joe McCarthy era ... and there's not a single word offered by the Lynch mob to suggest otherwise ...

Why is American team sport so isolationist? One answer is how different structurally US sports are from that of other nations. Outcomes are much harder to control in the international arena. Every major sporting league in the US is rigged, so no team can dominate for too long. The weakest teams in one season, under the draft system, for example, get first pick of the best new players to boost them in the next season.
It is a form of sporting welfarism that does not exist in international sport. National leagues, like the English Premier League, that provide players to international teams, all use promotion and relegation to reward and punish performance. The concept is alien to Americans.
Another explanation is how unexportable US sports have proved. India has used an English game to assert its nationalism. The West Indies, Pakistan, South Africa and, of course, Australia love cricket as a way of sticking it to their former colonial masters.
The American empire has produced no equivalent. Despite the huge wealth of the NFL, NBA, and MLB, no US ally takes these sports seriously. In Australia, basketball is dwarfed as a spectator sport by Aussie rules and rugby league. Even Japan, a nation remade by US occupation, would choose to win the soccer World Cup than have a Japanese-based franchise play Major League Baseball.
But the most powerful explanation is the one most often missed: sporting insularity reflects and contributes to the success of the American melting-pot. The assimilation of immigrants across 250 years has come at the price of international sporting mediocrity.
Three German Americans, in different ways, help us explain this: Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump and my father-in-law.
Henry Kissinger was one of very few American leaders who liked soccer. Kissinger, an émigré from Nazi Germany in his teens, saw in European football an arena where power counts. Wealthy clubs rule the roost over poorer ones. This free market is cutthroat, ruthless and unmediated by meaningful regulation that would make it more equitable.

At this point the reptiles inserted a snap of the authoritarian wannabe dictator ...

Donald Trump throws a ball during a press conference on the 2018 football World Cup in Helsinki

Strange, the pond could have sworn it was at another event ...

It turns out that it's the sort of cheap snap that turns up everywhere ...

Sheesh, the pond realised that for a moment it had broken summer school rules and fact checked a reptile snap ...

Speaking of sport, consider the mango Mussolini's rivals on the field ...

Game, set and authoritarian dictator fascist match ...

Enough already, back to the Lynch mob celebrating the incipient ascendancy of the authoritarian dictator ...

Trump, the paternal grandson of a German immigrant, is drawn to soccer for similar reasons. Though he disdains the European Union – progressive free-loaders – he loves its football leagues – where might makes right. If only the US could embrace football, America’s huge demographic and resource advantages would make it a soccer-superpower. Kissinger and Trump thought soccer would be a boon to American nationalism. This has not happened and is unlikely to. My father-in-law is the reason why.
Don reviled international sport because it obliged him to contemplate and rank his identities. Of German extraction, he wanted nothing to do with Die Mannschaft. He was an American, first and last (and Texan by the grace of God). An old-world sport which asked him to choose between an ethnic identity (Germany) and a political loyalty (America), he had no truck with.
Variations of Don’s position across the US population explain why international team sport is considered so inferior to national sporting codes. Many Latinos have a near religious reverence for soccer. The genius of the American experiment in mass immigration is that this loyalty is rarely tested in a match between a Latin American nation and the US.
If international team sport had the same resonance as it does in England or Poland, Mexican Americans would face a loyalty test each time their nations met. Because this match-up barely registers, the test is not posed. America does not stop when the US plays Mexico. The 35.9 million Americans who claimed Mexican heritage (in the 2020 census) can support either/both/neither with little consequence for their hyphenated identity.

Yep, the country is truly stuffed, and the reptiles reminded the pond of another reason why, with a snap of a man who entranced the reptiles while alive, and even more so when dead ...

Henry Kissinger

Then the Lynch mob dives deep ...

The primacy of football (in England) and cricket (in Australia) makes split national loyalties harder to hold. Not impossible, but harder. A test of cultural assimilation in both is whether the newly arrived, and certainly eventually their children, barrack for their new national team or their old. That test is not posed in the US because international team sport has such little socio-cultural purchase.
The US Women’s National Team, the most successful women’s soccer team in the world (winning four World Cups), confirms this thesis. Without Cold War nationalism, the women’s team, as the 2023 World Cup in Australia/New Zealand revealed, has become a vehicle for a woke, anti-Americanism. This is another reason why so many Americans distrust soccer. It is a sport of a Europhilic elite: progressivism in two halves with insufficient ad breaks and low scoring. It is unAmerican.
It is paradoxical, therefore, that the progressive, anti-American finger-wagging of the women’s game has become by far the most imperial and capable of export. While the rest of the world has demurred from adopting gridiron and baseball, major sporting bodies like the EPL and Cricket Australia have been taking the knee in obedience to the identity politics agenda that is currently afflicting aspects of US sport – an agenda that gestated on the college campuses that produce so many American athletes.
When 22 kneeling millionaires oblige their working-class audience to embrace left-wing nostrums, on a cold night in Leicester or windy morning in Perth, there is evidence of a new form of American cultural imperialism at work. What US sport could not conquer in its forms and passions, it has in its ideological packaging.

That last rant is so bizarre and singular that the pond realised that compared to the Lynch mob, and without any interest in sport at all, the pond knew more than the scribbler about certain sports.

"While the rest of the world has demurred from adopting gridiron and baseball..."?

Please, antique prof, consult the wiki, baseball in Cuba ...and contemplate these lines ...

Despite its American origin, baseball is strongly associated with Cuban nationalism, as it effectively replaced colonial Spanish sports such as bullfighting. Since the Cuban Revolution, the league system in Cuba has been nominally amateur. Top players are placed on the national team, earning money for training and playing in international competitions.

The pond only needed one exception to mock your exceptionalism, but please consult the wiki Baseball in Japan ... which began "Baseball was introduced to Japan in 1872 and is Japan's most popular participatory and spectator sport."

At this point the reptiles offered another snap ...

US soccer star Megan Rapinoe

The pond remains surprised that the Lynch mob didn't note the usual meme ... that women's sport is a refuge for lesbians ...

But he still managed an enormously fatuous amount of verbiage containing endless stupidities ...

But I remain optimistic. This fad will pass. The enduring popularity of American sport lies not in how it elicits shame but in how it reinforces national character. The progressive seizure is partial and temporary. A nation as diverse and fractious as the US has found in its sport a source of unity and patriotism.
It is no accident that the Star-Spangled Banner is sung, with genuine emotion, at the beginning of sports matches, large and small. It remains a more powerful welcome to country than anything we have in Australia.
There are many reasons the US remains the number one destination of migrants seeking a better life. The one we miss is possibly one of the most important: American sport. Its localism rather than its internationalism makes it a vehicle for social harmony, cultural inclusion and racial equality.
In a polarised nation, these are at a premium. Don, my father-in-law, understood this. Go Rangers!
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

And there you have the thoughts of a weird prof primed to vote for an authoritarian dictator blathering on about the progressive seizure of sport ...

Now consider this. Some cartoonists still think they might be able to lock him up ...

But that only makes the beast stronger and more likely to succeed, and with the Supreme Court in his pocket and the remarkable ability of the US court system to dither and delay, at best it's a long shot...

Thanks to the likes of the Lynch mob, things are looking up for orange Jesus's desire to stay out of jail. The pond never thought it would end up quoting Time, but needs must ...

It was meant, as ever, as a softball question for his pal, but former President Donald Trump couldn’t just take the gimme from Sean Hannity. The Fox News host wanted to bat down the ample reporting that Trump and his allies were already laying the groundwork for a return to power, replete with penance for his foes, punishment for his enemies, and penalties for those who stood in his way. “Under no circumstances, you’re promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked Trump in Davenport, Iowa, back on Dec. 5.
But the former President, as ever, could not help himself. “Except for day one,” Trump replied. 
It was a stunning declaration, one that Democrats thought might be the key disqualifying piece of evidence in their case for ensuring Trump never again be allowed near the White House. Yet at that exact moment, the prestigious Des Moines Register poll was in the field, and what it found complicates the critics’ read of Trump’s answer. Among likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers, the poll found, a full one-fifth—19%—believe such a quest for vengeance makes it more likely that they would support Trump. 
The survey also found a full 14% were more inclined to back Trump based on his lies alleging fraud in the 2020 election justified his terminating parts of the Constitution. More broadly, 50% said Trump’s plans for "sweeping raids, giant camps and mass deportations" made him a more attractive candidate, and a solid 43% were more likely to vote for Trump based on his comments that "the radical left thugs that live like vermin" in the country needed to be rooted out. And 42% apparently experienced a similar surge of support when told that Trump has said immigrants who enter the United States illegally are "poisoning the blood.”
Put simply: Trump’s most audacious aspirations for an American autocracy are not costing him with the voters he needs the most at this moment, just weeks before Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina prove to be his first test of a comeback. In fact, such comments may help Trump build a firewall against challengers like former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and tech bro Vivek Ramaswamy. All the while, Trump is singing the praises of dictators and setting off alarms among scholars of autocracy.

And so to the bonus of the day, and the pond will use the words of its resident poet as an introduction ...

Who knows what further treasures
Beneath her surface lie
Who knows to what far coffers
Her looted profits fly...

It was a story dear to the reptile heart ...

The actual story had a slightly less inflammatory heading ...

Energy security must be prioritised, Santos and Woodside insist as merger talks expected to resume

And it began with a media link that attempted to soften talk of war on the woke a little more ...

Media-link
Gas has ‘important’ and ‘long-term role’ in economy’s net zero transformation

Then came the byline ...

By colin packham
6:47AM January 4, 2024

And by golly, good old Col knew how to stir the climate science possum ...

Australia is in the midst of an “anti fossil fuels war” and it risks affordable and reliable energy supplies, the chief executives of two of the country’s largest gas companies have said.
As talks between Santos and Woodside over a potential tie-up are set to resume within weeks.
Australia is moving rapidly to reshape its $2.5tr economy and wean off its fossil fuel dependency, Kevin Gallagher, the chief executive of Santos, said the country is at risk of being dangerously idealistic.
“My biggest concern is for energy security and affordability, both at home and for our trading partners in Asia who rely on us for the energy that drives their economies. We cannot turn the taps off on oil and gas before there are replacement technologies,” said Mr Gallagher.
“Renewables are a big part of the solution, but we are still a long way from technologies that would replace fossil fuels in making steel, cement, fertilisers and the petrochemicals that make medicines, medical products, paint, plastics and the polymers that are the foundation for so many products we take for granted in modern life.”

The yarn was even blessed with a snap, with a most unfortunate label ...

“Renewables are a big part of the solution, but we are still a long way” says Santos CEO Kevin Gallagher. Picture: Kelly Barnes

It reminded the pond of its favourite saying: "much has been done, but much remains to be done" ... then it was on with the comedy stylings ...

Santos is moving to develop new sources of LNG, while also developing a carbon capture and storage project set to come online later this year.
Carbon capture and storage is controversial, with critics insisting it is unreliable and will delay the transition to renewable energy, while proponents argue the technology will minimise the disruption on the economy allowing for existing infrastructure to be used as well as sufficient time to build replacement renewable energy sources.
Mr Gallagher said Australia must embrace carbon capture and storage.

Good one, Monsieur Gallagher. Truly your comedy stylings verge on genius ...

Please, deliver another zinger ...

“My fear is that we continue to delay the transformation of energy markets because of a debate that centres on one solution or one technology rather than a pragmatic, market-led, technology-neutral approach that allows industry to get on with decarbonisation.”

Okay, okay, the pond has been to the Climate Council ...

But hustlers gotta hustle, grifters gotta grift ... and climate science denialists have to move in strange and mysterious ways to keep their businesses afloat ... and if it happens to stuff the planet, who cares ...

The vision for Australia’s LNG industry was echoed by Woodside’s chief executive Meg O’Neill, who said the country must demonstrate its commitment to the sector by removing regulatory uncertainty surrounding new LNG projects.
“Reform is needed to resolve ongoing policy uncertainty related to timely approvals of much-needed investment, not only in new gas developments but across the energy and resources sectors more broadly,” said Ms O’Neill.
“Without certainty around project approvals, Australia’s position as a globally competitive investment destination is challenged and we risk missing the opportunity to demonstrate leadership in the energy transition.”
Environmentalists have secured a spate of legal victories in recent months, challenging regulatory approvals.
Santos and Woodside have been hit most notably, and Ms O’Neill late last year said she expected further challenges to its $16.5bn Scarborough project.
The two LNG giants are still only in early stages of merger talks, Santos and Woodside confirmed late last year, and The Australian understands the two sides are expected to resume discussions later this month.
A deal would create a global LNG giant, allowing a combined company to profit from the near-term demand for gas.
Woodside, under Ms O’Neill, has positioned itself to capitalise on strong near-term demand for fossil fuels, while the company envisages demand for LNG to remain robust until 2050 as traditional sources of energy run low and new sources take longer to mature.
But a Woodside-Santos merger would not be entirely smooth. Some investors question the WA oil and gas giant’s interest in some assets owned by Santos.
Santos holds quality assets in PNG, but its WA assets service the domestic market, and doubt remains over whether the company’s massive investment in coal seam gas in Queensland was worth the money spent.

Luckily, Wilcox was on hand with a cartoon, though the pond suspects it had seen this one before ...but hey, what's wrong with recycling ...