In which the pompous, portentous hole in the bucket man is in fine form, and there's a visit from a Sydney carpetbagger ...

 

Flee the Taliban for their treatment of women? The Taliban? They’re nothing. Rank amateurs. 

Try the Australian Labor Party if you want to learn how to hang a woman out to dry. Especially if it involves having a conscience. Robots only please …

Still, it helped set the cartoonists off, with the infallible Pope pottering away ...

In other news, it seems citizenship revenge is in the air - important caveat, according to the lizard Oz - and even as the cocaine-snorting, allegedly condom-avoiding Lehrmann presents in court in the deep north in relation to another matter, Dame Slap is still banging on about Higgins (not the musical one). 

Just you wait, Ms Higgins, oh just you wait ...

Spare the pond and please spare the pond from woke jokes of the kind offered up by simplistic "here no conflict of interest" Simon ...

A little later the reptiles decided to embark on a rolling coverage of the election they'd been ignoring for weeks, but as The Sun and The Times had already jumped ship and sold the Tories down the river, like the Murdochian rats they are, all the pond could do was to urge Liverpool to stay true ... lest we have to endure a headline boasting that it was the Murdochs wot done it ...

Luckily the pond's business is on the far right of the digital edition, and naturally the pond ignored the meretricious Merritt to focus on the hole in the bucket man, and luckily at the time the pond dropped in, our Henry was amongst the contenders at the top of the world, ma ...

Why the hole in the bucket man should get so excited about Assange right at this point in time must remain a deep mystery, but the pond is always up for the thoughts of a man who wears his learning heavily, in as ponderous and pompous and portentous a way as possible ...

Talk about escaping the rule of law and not mention the valiant work of the orange Jesus and SCOTUS and all the rest?

That's the hole in the bucket man, and there were videos and snaps as a distraction ...

The funniest came from the dog botherer ...

That text read "Sky News host Chris Kenny says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is 'so far out of touch' with Australians as he believes the biggest thing happening is the return of 'anarchist' WikiLeaks..."

Never mind the grammar, what does that say about the peculiar obsession of our Henry?

Apparently our Henry is so far in touch with Australians he believes the biggest thing happening and worthy of his heavy book larnin' is the return of WikiLeaks, aka Assange.. but forget these quibbles, because surely the next gobbet will satisfy the most demanding pedants...

Now there's a classic effort. Sure, Thucydides didn't make the cut, but Louis XIV's memoirs, Marchamont Nedham (with Latin titles), John Milton, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rosseau did, albeit the latter without mention of onanism or masturbation (perhaps our Henry was doing enough for both of them?) ...

Ripper stuff ... have a cartoon on another matter ...

After that splendid outburst, there was no way that our Henry could maintain the rage and vent his classical larnin' spleen with a similar level of elevated references, and so the next gobbet was a tad disappointing ...

With the greatest respect, Washington and Martin Luther King are a step down, and bring our Henry close to an uncomfortable reminder of what he's been studiously ignoring ...

Then there was just a short gobbet to go ...

The pond will credit "antinomian" - Xians here, wiki here - as an arcane slur, a flourish and a return to form in the last gobbet - but if the hole in the bucket man had wanted to preen and pontificate and indulge in righteous anger about lawbreakers, surely there were more important and more significant targets to hand ...

And so to the usual "anger with renewables" bonus ...

There were a couple of videos as a distraction ...

... but here the pond must do a spoiler. 

You see, one of the authors was actually a Sydney blow-in, a carpetbagger, a bewigged Sydney barrister ...

Not to mention a scamp and a rapscallion, and a known associate of a long-term windmill hater ...

You might remember the beefy boofhead from stories such as this one  back in November 2022...

... or this one in Crikey in February 2020 ...

Incidentally that link to the anti-windfarm rally still leads to the beefy boofhead's performance here, with a chance to watch him on YouTube here ... assuming a stray masochist dropped in for a visit ...

Here, have a cartoon ...

The pond usually doesn't do spoilers so early, but it's worth knowing a little of the history when doing the read ... it's almost up there with those SCOTUS wives, known for there way with flags and with coups ...

The pond was delighted that instead of renewables, the Gundary folk were keen to narrow down the visual pollution by allowing an SMR to be built on the plain ... but the pond was recently disappointed to read World's largest nuclear reactor is finally completed. But it won't run for another 15 years:

The world's largest fusion reactor has finally been completed, but it won't run for another 15 years, project scientists have announced.

The International Fusion Energy Project (ITER) fusion reactor, consisting of 19 massive coils looped into multiple toroidal magnets, was originally slated to begin its first full test in 2020. Now scientists say it will fire in 2039 at the earliest.

This means that fusion power, of which ITER's tokamak is at the forefront, is very unlikely to arrive in time to be a solution for the climate crisis.

"Certainly, the delay of ITER is not going in the right direction," Pietro Barabaschi, ITER's director general, said at a news conference on Wednesday (July 3). "In terms of the impact of nuclear fusion on the problems humanity faces now, we should not wait for nuclear fusion to resolve them. This is not prudent."

The world's largest nuclear reactor and the product of collaboration between 35 countries — including every state in the European Union, the U.K., China, India and the U.S. — ITER contains the world's most powerful magnet, making it capable of producing a magnetic field 280,000 times as strong as the one shielding Earth.

The reactor's impressive design comes with an equally hefty price-tag. Originally slated to cost around $5 billion and fire up in 2020, it has now suffered multiple delays and its budget swelled beyond $22 billion, with an additional $5 billion proposed to cover additional costs. These unforeseen expenses and delays are behind the most recent, 15-year delay.

Never mind, an SMR it must be, and so to a final gobbet ...

For anyone wondering, that last link led to a story by a lesser member of the Kelly gang, because you've got to keep the aged demographic deep inside the hive mind ...

The pond couldn't quite work out the relevance, but it never can with reptile links ...

And so on, and the pond, having done its reptile duty, can offer up a final cartoon ...