In which the pond wanders about and only has a latter-day Enoch to brood about ...

 

The pond has been disappointed in this year's reptile build-up to Anzac day, and has to thank Charlie Lewis at Crikey (paywall) for a summary of the best on offer:

Anzac Day retreat Anzac Day hasn’t managed the same kind of heat since the fury of the Yassmin Abdel-Magied/Scott McIntyre peaks of yesteryear, but that will never stop the noble soldiers of Australia’s forever culture wars from having a go. Nationals MP and walking pub meal Barnaby Joyce has initiated an attack on the government for its leave policy, which allows public servants to work on Thursday and take time off in lieu, as a “deliberate attempt to dilute the importance of Anzac day”, which is pretty funny, given Joyce’s attack is diluted version of the exact same thing he said last year. Wait till Joyce hears about the anti-Australian anarchists at Coles, Woolworths, Target, Aldi, Dan Murphy’s, BWS, Big W, Kmart, Bunnings, and Best and Less, not to mention those commies at the AFL, and NRL.
Speaking of Woolies, Senator Pauline Hanson, very much in her “going door to door trying to offend people” phase after failing to make much of a mark in the Indigenous Voice to Parliament debate, made a tenuous slam on the retail giant. Having apparently boycotted Woolworths since it was insufficiently amped about Australia Day, Hanson posted she had “learned Woolworths has also refused to stock the RSL’s special Anzac biscuit tins”. The only problem is the implication — that Woolworths was cancelling Anzac Day and abandoning our brave diggers — was demonstrably untrue.

Feeble stuff from the usual feeble players, and instead the pond was ineluctably drawn to the following Lewis item:

The pond rarely features the panhandling Panahi, and probably shouldn't mention its deep devotion to the idea of dressing as a cat, provided your bumhole can be digitally erased, and Lewis's text was in the same vein ...

Panahi attacks a middle school in Utah for its apparent failure to stop “furries” from terrorising other students — allegedly “biting” and “licking” them, but it’s only the nice normal kids who retaliate who get suspended, on account of woke. Furries are (please don’t Google it) a subculture of people who dress up and act like animal characters — they’re often a tangential target for anti-LGBTQIA+ campaigners. Yet again, this outrage seems to be baseless, with Nebo School District spokesperson Seth Sorenson forced to clarify that the kerfuffle had resulted from the distortion of a message the school sent out about bullying. According to Sorenson, kids were being called names and having food thrown at them “because they were dressed differently”, including wearing headbands “that may have ears on them”.
“These are pretty young kids,” Sorenson told The Salt Lake Tribune. “You’ll have students that show up with headbands and giant bows; you’ll have students that show up dressed as their favourite basketball player, or baseball player. That’s just what kids this age do.”
The outrage, fomented by right-wing radio hosts and the deeply grubby Libs of TikTok YouTube channel, before being swallowed unquestioningly by Pahani four days after Sorenson’s comments, continues an extremely long-standing desire on the part of right-wing media to fall for hoaxes about children “identifying” as animals. And this isn’t just harmless idiocy — the police had to attend the school to investigate the bomb threats it received in the aftermath of the coverage.

The pond recalled all the kids that were out and about in rabbits ears at Easter, and before that the deer antlers that seemed to sprout on heads and cars alike, and realised yet again there was a deep sickness in the land ... News Corp...

As this is a laidback holyday, what else caught the eye? The pond happened to clip this from a rolling Graudian news of the day ...

The pond hadn't realised that Uncle Elon was a Maoist, but shouldn't have been surprised. 

As Chairman Mao himself said back in 1957 when identifying enemies of the people in a speech and in an essay On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People:

"At the present stage, the period of building socialism, the classes, strata and social groups which favour, support and work for the cause of socialist construction all come within the category of the people, while the social forces and groups which resist the socialist revolution and are hostile to or sabotage socialist construction are all enemies of the people." (wiki)

All hail Chairman Mao and Chairman Musk ...

Meanwhile, Graham Readfearn was being naughty in the Graudian yet again ... Dutton’s plan to save Australia with nuclear comes undone when you look between the brushstrokes.

The Coalition has said it wants to put nuclear reactors at the sites of coal-fired power plants, but hasn’t said where, how big the reactors will be, when it wants them built or given an estimate on cost.
The Coalition has previously said it would give more details on its plan in time for its response to the Albanese government’s budget next month, but Dutton is now saying it will come “in due course”.
Despite this, Dutton claimed in his interview with the ABC’s David Speers that: “I believe that we’re the only party with a credible pathway to net zero by 2050.”
OK then.

Okay, then ...

Okay, then, and while hopping about, why not recall Elizabeth Kolbert's essay in The New Yorker, "The "Epic Row" over a new Epoch.

It was all to do with what to do about the notion of the Anthropocene, and it was a joyous reminder of the way that science has routinely seen schismatics and splitters gumming up the works. 

Spoiler alert, by the very end of it, Kolbert (she discloses she is an Anthropocene partisan) tried to pacify the angry mob of spluttering geologists:

...The future of the Anthropocene as an official stratigraphic unit is, at this point, unclear. The A.W.G. dissolved after the vote, but, as several members of the group pointed out to me, the leadership of the I.C.S. is due to turn over this summer, after the quadrennial International Geological Congress, set to take place in South Korea. Kim Cohen, a Dutch geologist who, at fifty, is one of the younger members of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy and who cast a “yes” vote for the new epoch, told me that he expects to see the Anthropocene added to the geological timescale within his life.

“I think many of my fellow S.Q.S. members will not see it,” he added by way of clarification.

But the Anthropocene’s future as an informal time period is assured. It’s too apt—and too important—a term to be abandoned. As Paul Crutzen pointed out in 2002, barring a “meteorite impact, a world war or a pandemic,” humans “will remain a major environmental force for many millennia.” Science recently summed up the situation this way: “the anthropocene is dead. long live the anthropocene.”

Crutzen died in 2021, so it’s impossible to know what he would have said about the recent I.C.S. vote. I imagine, though, that he would have responded to it much as he did to a question I posed to him back in 2010. What was important about the Anthropocene, he told me at that time, was not whether it was included in geology texts, but whether it prompted people to think more carefully about the consequences of their collective actions.

“What I hope,” he said, “is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ will be a warning to the world.” 

 

Considering itself warned, the pond moved on to the reptile edition for the day, and the baleful presence in the top far right position suggested that the usual mob had slacked off for the day ...

Rather than dwell on visiting Bredan rabbiting on about the crisis in western civilisation and Zionism - there is a crisis going on, but it involves a genocide and many bodies under and above the ground - why not have a read of Naomi Klein in The Graudian, We need an exodus from Zionism...

She gets quite heated and biblical ...

I’ve been thinking about Moses, and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf.
The ecofeminist in me was always uneasy about this story: what kind of God is jealous of animals? What kind of God wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself?
But there is a less literal way of understanding this story. It is about false idols. About the human tendency to worship the profane and shiny, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.
What I want to say to you tonight at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. Drunk on it. Profaned by it.
That false idol is called Zionism.
It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land – a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.
Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba.
From the start it has been at war with dreams of liberation. At a Seder it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism equates Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship and client states.
From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats – much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the death of their sons.
Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm and it is time that we said clearly: it has always been leading us here.
It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.

And so on, and though visiting Brendan wasn't likely to read it, it was more than enough for the pond, and it was time to look below the fold, and discover yet another light serve ...

Petulant Peta doing Covid yet again? That's the best she can do on this day?

Nah, not really. 

And as for Jack going on about the war to end all wars, the pond has already brooded about the pond's grandad, a machine gunner deep in the Somme mud, and a raging drunk and wife beater on return.

And the pond always regards the lizard Oz editorials as filler, so there was nothing for it but to give our very own Enoch a run ...

Ah yes, 'Breaker' Morant, wot wot, and the rule of the .303, and nothing like a good colonial brew, a spiffing stoush, wot wot, and then for some damn useless reason, the pesky, difficult uppity blacks ended up running the country, and so much for the Boers and the Brits ...

And as for Churchill's Dardanelles folly, which clearly had nothing to do with who won the war, it was an epic exercise in stupidity and futility, but armchair generals still love it ...

Say what? A drawn match? What form of delusion is this, (a) to treat war as some kind of game of football played by Queen Victoria warriors, and (b) then to proclaim a draw, when Johnny Turk had clearly whupped British, Australian and NZ arses ...

A lot of people died for an entirely useless form of Churchillian dreaming, not the first or the last time he'd initiate a folly.

As for calling it a draw, that's a bit like counting the Dunkirk evacuation as a win. 

Sure, it made for a number of movies and a feel good vibe, but there's no way of stepping around the way that the Nazi hordes had whupped the allies' arses, with sociopathic Adolf preening himself in the streets of Paris ...

It wasn't fatal, but it was a near run thing, until Adolf, like many a sociopathic fool, tried the Napoleonic strategy of war on many fronts ...

To top it all, the reptiles featured a snap of soldiers being cruel to native fauna, and it has to be said, with the image looking cheaply and nastily colourised, or maybe it's just a cheap and nasty rag...

Then it was on to more memories of now distant wars, with nary a mention of John Monash being blackballed...

Actually the shock was a little muted, at least in relation to Darwin, because the government muted the figures ...

Strict censorship was imposed in Australia at the start of World War II. The Menzies Government formed the Department of Information (DOI) to control publicity. It was believed censorship was necessary to prevent valuable information falling into enemy hands and to maintain high morale at home.

An example of the wartime censorship was the Government report on the bombing of Darwin in February 1942. The ‘official’ death toll was given as 17 when in reality the number was closer to 250. (here)

It was Singapore and the guns pointing the wrong way, and the loss of the Sydney that put the cat amongst the pigeons (the pond's mother occasionally dropped hints about her loss of a sailor lover onboard the Sydney, but the pond never found out if it was but a passing wartime fantasy).

At this point the reptiles began to drop in their free stock footage illustrations ...

Then it was back to the rambling ...

Actually it was Curtin's speech on 14th March 1942 that will be remembered, and for those who care to remember there's a transcript and an audio file (which the pond didn't try but which automatically downloads as a .mov) here...

"There is no belittling of the Old Country in this outlook. Britain has fought and won in the air the tremendous battle of Britain. Britain has fought, and with your strong help, has won, the equally vital battle of the Atlantic. She has a paramount obligation to supply all possible help to Russia. She cannot, at the same time, go all out in the Pacific. We Australians, with New Zealand, represent Great Britain here in the Pacific - we are her sons - and on us the responsibility falls. I pledge to you my word we will not fail. You, as I have said, must be our leader. We will pull knee to knee with you for every ounce of our weight.

"We looked to America, among other things, for counsel and advice, and therefore it was our wish that the Pacific War Council should be located at Washington. It is a matter of some regret to us that, even now, after 95 days of Japan's staggering advance south, ever south, we have not obtained first-hand contact with America. Therefore, we propose sending to you our Minister for External Affairs (Dr H.V. Evatt), who is no stranger to your country, so that we may benefit from his discussions with your authorities. Dr Evatt's wife, who will accompany him, was born in the United States. Dr Evatt will not go to you as a mendicant. He will go to you as the representative of a people as firmly determined to hold and hit back at the enemy as courageously as those people from whose loins we spring... those people who withstood the disaster of Dunkirk, the fury of Goering's blitz, the shattering blows of the Battle of the Atlantic. He will go to tell you that we are fighting mad; that our people have a government that is governing with orders and not with weak-kneed suggestions; that we Australians are a people who, while somewhat inexperienced and uncertain as to what war on their own soil may mean, are nevertheless ready for anything, and will trade punches, giving odds if needs be, until we rock the enemy back on his heels.

"We are, then, committed, heart and soul, to total warfare. How far, you may ask me, have we progressed along that road? I may answer you this way. Out of every ten men in Australia four are wholly engaged in war as members of the fighting forces or making the munition and equipment to fight with. The other six, besides feeding and clothing the whole ten and their families, have to produce the food and wool and metals which Britain needs for her very existence. We are not, of course, stopping at four out of ten. We had over three when Japan challenged our life and liberty. The proportion is now growing every day. On the one hand we are ruthlessly cutting out unessential expenditure so as to free men and women for war work; and on the other, mobilizing woman-power to the utmost to supplement the men. From four out of ten devoted to war, we shall pass to five and six out of ten. We have no limit.

Thank the long absent lord, it was Curtin's mob that was in charge, and not Pig iron Bob, worshipper of all things British and in due course holder of the arduous position of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports ...

And so to the final gobbet ...

Lest we forget ...

And what was that about migrants? The old racist had to slip that one in at the very last? He couldn't let the Enoch Powell in him go?

Lest we forget ...

Lest we forget ...

And while in the business of lest we forgetting ...