How to discuss a war criminal without mentioning war crimes and how to discuss climate change by only talking about the weather ... please allow our Henry and Aidan Morrison to show you how ...

 

This day the reptiles are sullen and surprisingly subdued...

Even the gathering of the leet commentariat on the far right of the digital edition succumbed to dullard predictability.

Simplistic wet Simon has passed, and the pond has the pleasure of passing on garrulous Gemma.

Most predictable of all was our Henry, diligently doing his best to ensure that collective punishment, mass starvation, and mass displacement might continue apace, without let or hindrance. 

Our Henry would much prefer a lawless world, and so he offered up Flawed ICC now master of vigilante justice, The ICC is not as powerful as it would like to be, but the sad reality is that many Western governments, including Australia’s, take it seriously.

Agonisingly, it's a five minute read, or so the reptiles say, full of the usual portentous, pretentious and arcane references, all designed to dress up a simple desire - let Benji commit genocide in the way he likes, and don't go bothering him ...

First up came a snap of the real villain of the piece, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during a press conference at the San Carlos Palace in Bogota.

Then it was time for our Henry to rant in his inimitable way:

To seasoned observers of the International Criminal Court, the arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant are deja vu all over again.
That is not to suggest the ICC’s decision is trivial. But it is just another misjudgment by an institution as ill-managed in practice as it was ill-conceived in theory.
The court was, for sure, an experiment. In the past, war crimes trials, such as those as Nuremberg, were held once the conflict was over. In contrast, the ICC’s mandate allows it to intervene in the heat of the battle. That was always freighted with hopes and fraught with risks. None of the hopes eventuated; all of the risks did, and with a vengeance.
Unfortunately, the endless sequence of errors passed virtually unnoticed. For most of its history, the ICC focused on Africa, dealing with parts of the world far from the Western media’s eyes and even further from its understanding. Wracked by sand-laden winds or drenched in torrid heat, populated by warlords with a well-deserved reputation for savagery, these places were hardly tourist destinations.
It was there, however, that the ICC forged its standard operating procedure. Academics don’t agree on much, with Africanists being no exception. But on this there is little disagreement: the ICC’s interventions were almost always disastrous.

Ah the colonial legacy, so proudly celebrated by our Henry, just as a snap of his current hero, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference in Jerusalem, magically appears.

Then on with the diatribe:

First and fatally, the ICC allowed itself to be manipulated into picking sides in messy and protracted conflicts that hardly lent themselves to simplistic moralising.
Seeing why that happened is not difficult. Eager to initiate prosecutions but lacking any presence on the ground, the ICC depended on national governments and often deeply partisan NGOs for referrals, as well as on national security agencies for information and enforcement.
Heightening that dependence was its reluctance to properly visit, much less scrupulously investigate, the alleged crime scenes before rushing to judgment – a reluctance Antonio Cassese, the distinguished first president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, excoriated, like a teacher dressing down particularly inept students, when the court asked him to review its ­operations.
Predictably, Cassese’s report was ignored. As a result, in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Mali, Libya and Cote d’Ivoire, the ICC did exactly what its associates demanded: it seriously pursued only their opponents, despite the grievous culpability of the favoured side.
The effect was to strengthen the brutal, appallingly corrupt regimes on which the ICC relied, such as that of Joseph Kabila in the DRC, while stoking the regional, religious and ethnic resentments that had fuelled the conflicts in the first place.
To make things worse, the ICC repeatedly stymied peace processes, including by hindering the opponents’ participation in international negotiations. Compounding the difficulties, its refusal to endorse amnesties drastically reduced the incentive to reach agreement, contributing, for example, to the failure of the Ugandan negotiations in Juba and of peace initiatives in the DRC.
Claiming that conflicts could only be resolved by bringing alleged criminals to trial – “arrest the sought criminals today”, said its first Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, “and you will have peace and justice tomorrow” – it even tried to derail successful amnesty programs, such as the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration scheme in Uganda.
And when a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in the DRC, the ICC sapped its effectiveness by refusing to rule out prosecuting fighters who confessed. 

At this point the reptiles decided our Henry would be best served by a cross over video promotion featuring another rat in the ranks:

Former Labor MP Michael Danby says American and Israeli legislators should pay “no attention” to the ICC. The French government has cast doubt on whether it would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under warrants issued by the International Criminal Court last week, suggesting the Israeli leader might have immunity, raising questions about the court’s jurisdiction worldwide. “Amal Clooney and all of the advisors of the International Criminal Court are severely biased against Israel as their pre-existing statement showed,” Mr Danby said.

Is it time for a reference to ancient Rome and Greece? Sorry, but hopefully Kant and the Napoleonic wars will do:

Faced with the horrific consequences of having prolonged conflicts which in the DRC alone had cost over six million lives, the ICC proved unrepentant. Instead, its policy remained that Ocampo set out in 2007, when he said that “at the court, we can’t take our impact into account”. To Ocampo’s fatuous ­assertion his successor, Fatou Bensouda, added the absurdity that “taking into account peace initiatives” would compromise the ICC’s “impartiality”.
Those failings, as well as myriad others, may seem startling. But they would not have surprised Immanuel Kant. In 1784, he had echoed the proposal, advanced in 1713 by the abbe de Saint-Pierre, for a world court armed with coercive powers to secure “perpetual peace”.
By 1795, the start of what would become the Napoleonic Wars had induced a complete reconsideration.
In an analysis brilliantly extended by Harvard’s Judith Shklar (whose Legalism (1964) is a masterpiece of international jurisprudence), Kant drew two, strikingly relevant, conclusions.
The first is that “the possibility of formal justice cannot prevail under all political circumstances”. It is not the rule of law that makes a free society possible; it is the institutions of a free or “republican” society that enable the rule of law.
Those institutions, which give the legal system its legitimacy, include a parliament that monitors the workings of the laws and adapts them when they threaten freedom, an executive committed to the laws’ equal application, and most of all, a degree of public “unanimity on republican principles” that acts as a constant check on the abuse of judicial power.
The ICC’s claim that it “creates global governance without a global government”, as if the legal system could be isolated from its broader context, is consequently nonsense. As for pretending to build the rule of law without the scaffolding of liberal institutions – and the discipline and accountability they bring – it is nonsense upon stilts.
Second and even more important, an international court that could be swayed or dominated by illiberal polities was, Kant argued, not a recipe for a peace conducive to human flourishing: it was a recipe for the “peace of a graveyard”, in which freedom’s enemies would exploit the court to bury freedom’s friends.
The workings of such a court might look like justice and, in Shklar’s words, be considered “respectable by liberals anxious to avoid conflict”. But in “a world without a common interest in peace” and swarming with autocrats, they were a dangerous sham, fostering “the illusion that justice would be done”. 

Time for another villain to make an appearance,  UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres speaks to the media at the COP29 conference.

A little more Kant and our Henry will splutter to a close, perhaps wiping the righteous froth of Kantian indignation from his moosh:

Indeed, Kant went so far as to say that the “state of war is better, in the light of reason, than the ­fusion of states under a power”, i.e. the proposed court, that could facilitate the triumph of a “soulless despotism”. The wars might allow freedom to prevail and, however haltingly, spread; the “peace of a graveyard” never would.
Thankfully, the ICC is not as powerful as it would like to be. Those who have been among its most aggressive manipulators in the fight against Israel, such as South Africa, treat it with lordly disdain, flaunting their refusal to enforce its arrest warrant against Sudanese strongman Omar al-Bashir. Even the UN’s gormless Secretary-General, Antonio ­Guterres, did not hesitate to share a platform with Vladimir Putin, despite the ICC warrant for his arrest.
The sad reality, however, is that many Western governments, including Australia’s, take it seriously. Impervious to the ICC’s failure, chillingly ignorant of the West’s intellectual heritage, they display what Shklar mocked as a combination of “Pollyannish optimism and blindness to history”. Theirs, one can only conclude, truly is “the legalism of fools”.

The pond has been incredibly tolerant, patient, restrained and forbearing, and has allowed our Henry to burble away in his garden of bile and bitterness. (Is there an Oscar Wilde in the house to help him out of his garden?)

Now, if the pond might indulge, it would like to take up Yossi Verter in the persecuted and put upon Haaretz a week ago, Netanyahu Brought the ICC Ruling on Himself and Now He's Whining About Antisemitism.

How symbolic it is that the International Criminal Court decision's to issue an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu (and Yoav Gallant) came the day after the latest installment in the series "This Is How We'll Bury the State Inquiry Commission" – a plan by the prime minister to form a political investigative committee.
There's not much to say about it, except that the proposal, as usual, is based on Netanyahu's assumption that we are all stupid. He wants to form a committee whose members will fight with each other morning, noon and night, and become deadlocked till the end of days. In the meantime, no "other commission" may be formed, in the words of this scandalous legislation.
But let's go back to the business at hand: Last June, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara sent a letter urging Netanyahu to stop delaying and establish a state inquiry commission. Apart from all the self-evident reasons to do so, it might have enabled Israel to better deal with The Hague's threat, perhaps even remove it, certainly if the commission's mandate were expanded beyond the events of October 7 and the background to them.
Netanyahu, of course, refused. He won't establish a state inquiry commission, period. He is a man of principles.
The other developments taking place in his coalition, from the expanding movement to resettle Gaza (which Netanyahu has not denounced, only dismissing it once, early on, as "unrealistic") to the renewal of the judicial coup, all are closely connected to the weakness of the prime minister versus international institutions.

Well yes, all that and more, and if you follow the link above, you can read related stories:

• Starvation, murder, persecution: ICC warrants are an unprecedented moral nadir for Israel
• Defense officials concerned over ICC warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant setting precedent
• Is Netanyahu now a fugitive? ICC arrest warrants over Gaza are turning point for Israel

You might conclude that our Henry's piece represents an unprecedented moral nadir, but alas that means you haven't indulged in our Henry in the past. On with Verter:

If you campaign for years to weaken the legal system, don't be surprised that at the moment of truth, your own legal immunity is compromised. The conduct in the international arena was amateurish and shocking – there are hundreds of examples of this. For example, when the national security minister encourages militias to set fire to trucks carrying humanitarian aid, the responsibility falls on the prime minister. As the saying goes, he is the head, he is to blame.
Netanyahu brought the arrest warrant on himself through his stubbornness and arrogance. Now he is whining about antisemitism and Dreyfus. When it first became known that the ICC's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was leading the investigation, Netanyahu went into hysterics. He subsequently calmed down and, as usual, began to downplay the affair. As the process dragged on, and at the same time various accusations began to surface against Khan, the old Netanyahu returned, the one whose hubris gives rise to layers of stupidity and blindness. He moved from legal deliberations to propaganda. The official line is that the court is antisemitic, and the prosecutor better not dare touch us.
It would be fine if this only involved Netanyahu and Gallant. But this warrant could bring a wave of secret warrants against scores of officers and soldiers for their part in the never-ending war in Gaza.
The entire ICC business was handled clumsily from the start. Accusations of antisemitism, crimes against humanity, explicit threats against the prosecutor. The result: The prime minister of Israel finds himself on a very short list of serving world leaders with arrest warrants dangling over their heads. Another is Vladimir Putin, the one whose affinity put Netanyahu in "another league."
The Pavlovian reaction in Israel was shock and defiance. Opposition leader Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid were quick (even before many coalition members) to condemn the court's decision. True, the arrest warrants border on scandal, but they didn't occur in a vacuum. The same goes for the vast majority of the Israeli public, which – encouraged by the Netanyahu coalition and most of the media about what has really happened in Gaza in the past year, and what has happened to Israel in the international arena – was blind-sided.
Now Netanyahu and his cohorts will put their trust in the Trump administration. But the world is not just America. A pity. Ask Miri Regev's travel agent.

The thing notably missing from our Henry's piece was the out that the court offered Benji, avoided for obvious reasons, but noted in Haaretz here:

...The GOP is already threatening a barrage of sanctions on the institution, and Israel will surely lobby Trump to pressure the 124 countries that respect the court's jurisdiction to ignore the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.

The worst-case scenario for the court – and, many would argue, for the entire concept of international law and accountability – is that massive U.S. pressure on allies who help fund the ICC and uphold its legitimacy will lead to the court's collapse. This would require the United States to not only sanction the institution and its staff, but also foreign governments that cooperate with it.

It is perhaps the fear of this scenario that has led the ICC to suggest that if Israel provided proof that it was conducting its own reliable and independent investigation into alleged war crimes and violations of international law committed by soldiers in Gaza, then the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant could be shelved for now.

This presents a second scenario – one that would be good for Israel and could perhaps also save the court itself: An internal Israeli investigation might convince the court to freeze the warrants, at least temporarily. Israel's own attorney general, it should be noted, has been telling the government for months that the best way to combat the warrants and other threats in the international legal arena is to announce the formation of a national commission of inquiry into October 7 and the Gaza war.

There were many good reasons to do so even without taking international courts into consideration – but making it harder for the ICC's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, to get approval for arrest warrants against Israeli officials was surely a strong argument. Unfortunately, the Netanyahu government refused to do this: Because it is so fearful of what such a commission will eventually find, it prefers to do nothing rather than take any preventive action.

Indeed, indeed, Benji likely knows in his heart that he's a war criminal and has committed war crimes, and he was also derelict and negligent in the brutal attack that led to the hostage taking, and just as he's studiously ignored doing anything about the hostages while pursuing his war crimes, so he's studiously ignored any review of his government's actions.

Finally here's another matter worth noting which the pond came across while browsing Haaretz, an editorial, Israel Trying to Disappear Arab Citizens From the Democratic Process: 

The bill sponsored by Knesset member Hanoch Milwidsky (Likud), which limits the right of Israel's Arab citizens to vote and be elected in municipal elections, passed its preliminary vote in the Knesset on Wednesday. This legislation joins its ugly twin, which is also advancing, concerning the expansion of the justifications for disqualifying Arab parties and candidates in the Knesset elections as part of an amendment to the Basic Law on the Knesset.
MK Milwidsky's proposed law expands the possibility of disqualifying parties or individuals from participating in local elections. Until now, such limitations were imposed because of three reasons: if among the party's goals and actions, explicitly or implicitly, are the negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people; denying the democratic character of the country; or incitement to racism. Now the possibility for disqualification would also apply to an individual candidate, not just the party.

It's probably past time to give the notion of democracy in Israel a rest, compounded by Benji's desire to match Putin and Erodgan in his persecution of Haaretz.

As for those hoping that internal legal processes might prevail, see Uzi Baram in Haaretz, Netanyahu's Lackeys Have a Three-stage Plan to Destroy Israel's Liberal Democracy

Ordinarily I prefer to avoid definitive rulings and categorical pronouncements. But at this time, there is no alternative but to declare unequivocally: Benjamin Netanyahu is incapacitated from serving as the prime minister of Israel. No decent person can be convinced that ulterior motives lie behind this pronouncement.
Vilification, lies and threats will not help change this conclusion – nor will the hysterical screams of Tally Gotliv or the slander of ministers Yariv Levin and Shlomo Karhi which reeks to high heaven. The need to declare Netanyahu incapacitated from serving as prime minister is crystal clear and must be voiced publicly.
No body is as vilified by the Bibi-ists as the High Court of Justice. There is no fault they haven't found with the court, no effort they have spared to undermine its moral authority.
The High Court brought this campaign of scorn upon itself. The High Court – and no other – is guilty of the danger of the lie called Netanyahu. In May 2020, when 11 justices ruled that Netanyahu was fit to form a new government in spite of the indictments filed against him, both leftists and rightists applauded the decision. The presumption of innocence characterizes moderate and dispassionate liberal thinking.
Today, this ruling looks idiotic. Netanyahu, the man, has the right to be presumed innocent, just like every other citizen does. But a prime minister drowning in a sea of criminal cases, for whom every decision seems to be personal and not impartial, does not and could not enjoy the presumption of innocence.
The High Court ruling was a nod to the importance of reasonable doubt while at the same time an instance of neglecting the obvious. In the current highly charged atmosphere, the attorney general will not dare to declare him incapacitated. We must not ask this of her, when the campaign to fire her has become a public – and not just legal – battle.
Obviously, the prime minister must not be declared incapacitated – except according to the law and legal procedure. But the public and its representatives retain the right to regard Netanyahu as an incapacitated prime minister. A huge portion of the public would support this view, if it were presented emphatically by the opposition parties.
We must not accept the fact that Netanyahu is intentionally preventing a deal to bring home the hostages, allegedly through the use of lies and deliberate leaks. No empty declaration by a failed leader rolling his eyes and promising "to bring back our hostages" will convince anyone who understands that he has adopted the stance of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.
We have seen how he moved from totally distancing himself from his jailed spokesman Eli Feldstein to enthusiastically supporting him, just because the fire Feldstein set off could very well spread in the direction of Netanyahu's own office.
The fact that Netanyahu is preoccupied solely with his own survival has led his cabinet ministers to present the type of positions which have in recent years brought about the collapse of vibrant democracies in a process that involves three stages.
The first stage is neutering the power of the independent media and glorifying the media that sucks up to power. Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, who is trying to impose a religious regime on Israel, is leading the way to the elimination of public broadcasting and harming the newspaper that represents the alternative.
The second stage is the uncompromising war against the legal system, including the legal advisers of government ministries who are not lackeys of the incapacitated ruler.
The third stage is the increased control over the election results by requiring political parties to demonstrate "patriotism" and "nationalism," which will make the Arab parties illegitimate.
There is no place for desperation or for losing the fighting spirit. We are fighting for the liberal and democratic home the incapacitated government wants to set ablaze.

And so on, but the pond must move on to contemplate the latest effort by the reptiles in relation to climate science denialism, while mounting a bog standard routine assault on renewables.

This one came from a certain Aidan Morrison, and alleged Blackout fears prove our living standards are slipping, Our demand for energy doesn’t follow the sun. Now we’re being asked to make it so. There couldn’t be a clearer admission that our living standards are being degraded: we’re being asked to use less of something at the times when we need it most.

It's astonishing that "fears"could be taken as proof of something, but Morrison forced the pond to wander back down memory lane, back to its time in Tamworth when the town was served by its own coal-fired power station.

Long gone of course, and the pond still smarts at the punishment for playing in the slag heaps.

As for slipping living standards, the pond recalls that blackouts were a frequent occurrence, and something of a town joke. So suggesting to the pond that it's living standards are slipping from those halcyon days produced a gust, neigh a gale of laughter ... as the pond mentally returned to scrubbing the coal-gas grease from the kitchen walls ...

Never mind, a piece needs its villains, and so the reptiles opened with Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

That's the very last time you'll hear about "climate change".

From now on we must talk about the weather, in a tone ranging from hysterical to demented:

One good reason to have a controllable supply of electricity at our disposal is to help us cope with the things that we can’t control – like hot weather.
When NSW Premier Chris Minns asked Sydney residents to switch off appliances on Wednesday, he confirmed that the electricity system we’re building won’t do that.
Immediately after calling for businesses and households to avoid using energy intensive appliances from 3pm to 8pm, he gave a simple explanation: “The reason for that is that solar production in the energy market starts to come off from 3pm, at exactly the same time as people return from work.”
It’s staggeringly simple. Our demand for energy doesn’t follow the sun. And now we’re being asked to make it so. There couldn’t be a clearer admission that our living standards are being degraded: we’re being asked to use less of something at the times when we need it most.
The efforts to shield the current government’s narrative from such uncomfortable realities has revealed a number of awkward contortions of fact and logic.

At this point, the reptiles introduced that villain, NSW Premier Chris Minns with Minister for Energy Penny Sharpe during a press conference on Wednesday to discuss steps being taken to manage the energy system. Picture: NewsWire / Nikki Short

When doing this sort of denialism, it's bog standard reptile form to downplay the recent heatwave. The pond has already celebrated Sydney airport's world record:

Sadly Morrison isn't interested in celebrating this seasonal triumph:

The first is about the extremity of the weather. In parliament on Wednesday, Energy Minister Chris Bowen provided an update saying NSW is undergoing a “lengthy and severe heatwave”.
On Wednesday, the highest temperature in Sydney was 38C in Penrith. That’s a hot day, but not extreme. On January 4, 2020, Penrith reached over 48C.
Others areas in Sydney mightn’t have noticed that it was a “heatwave” if the media wasn’t harping on the term with the blackout warnings. The CBD only briefly exceeded 30C, reaching 32C at 11am. Tuesday and Thursday in central Sydney were mild days, in the mid-20s.
The need to overplay how extraordinary the weather was is betrayed by comments made by the Australian Energy Market Operator chief executive Daniel Westerman on Tuesday: “Effectively that is a summer heatwave while we are still here in spring”. That’s true technically, but summer starts next week. A hot day in late November is hardly unseasonal.
Westerman continues with a clue about what really happened: “It’s pretty normal that both ­generation and transmission use periods in autumn and spring to undertake maintenance activities.”
A spreadsheet of generator availabilities published by WattClarity sets the scene and throws some light on AEMO’s comments. Three of the state’s 12 coal units were unavailable due to planned maintenance, not unforeseen failures. Two of these are meant to be back online before December 1, with the final one ready on December 3. For the rest of December all generators are expected to be available.

Speaking of Tamworth, how pleasing to see that Barners is back and has been dragooned in as an interruption:

Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce says the blackout warnings across New South Wales and in Sydney show the Albanese government have made an “absolute debacle” out of the power grid. “It is just a ruse to cover up the fact you have made an absolute debacle out of your power grid,” Mr Joyce said. “That was a sunny day at the beach.”

What a travesty, why didn't Barners himself feature? Why was cliff-top Albo the featured figure? Why was Barners unwilling to celebrate the Sydney airport and spring records so proudly set?

How can we set even higher records? Why, dinkum clean virginal Oz coal is the answer:

The truth is we were caught short of energy because the weather didn’t quite obey the calendar demarcation between spring and summer. Someone in charge of planning misjudged the appropriate maintenance window by one week.
No wonder we’re being asked to believe that a hot day in late spring is extremely unseasonal. The portrayal of the coal fleet as being some wobbly clutch of clunkers that are teetering on the edge of collapse is a severe misrepresentation of the truth.
One unit was unavailable due to forced outage. But three were getting the maintenance they need to ensure reliable power in the summer. Without them, as we’ve seen from this week, our energy system is made precarious and vulnerable. No energy system is available 100 per cent of the time. Maintenance is needed routinely, and breakdowns occasionally happen.
But the difference between a thermal generator and wind or solar is that the majority of the outages – for maintenance – can be scheduled so it doesn’t happen all at once. Unforeseen accidents are rare and a modest degree of redundancy can ensure reliability of such a system.
This week was a perfect illustration. We had one unit break down, but the real failure was assuming that the weather would be more predictable than it was, and mis-planning maintenance.
With wind and solar, none of the output can be known more than a couple of days in advance. And instead of being able to build in redundancy, and turn one generator on when another turns off, the inherently correlated nature of weather events means that all generators experience the worst shortfalls (and surpluses) at the same time.

At this point the reptiles introduced Daniel Westerman:

And so to the close, with Morrison celebrating the singular feat of avoiding climate science and any mention of climate in his talk of the weather. 

Oh there was yadda yadda about real world circumstances and terrifying talk of a sign of things to come, which might have impressed the pond if it hadn't lived through the days of the Tamworth power station:

Many of the proposed solutions to this underlying reality don’t pass their first brush with real world circumstances.
Batteries provided 0.2 per cent of our energy in the 48hrs to 5pm on Thursday. Heatwaves don’t produce consistent solar at the times when it’s needed.
On Wednesday at 5.30pm, rooftop solar met just 5 per cent of NSW demand. At noon, it was 31.5 per cent. Demand peaks when we change spaces, such as arriving home to a hot house after school or work, and getting the airconditioner to cool the living room. That’s when solar fades.
The solution we depended on to combat this crisis was to ask industry to power down. As confirmed by Bowen, the Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader – or “RERT” – scheme succeeded in finding an industrial load that would stop work for a fee to avoid the risk of blackouts.
This is a sign of things to come. We can control our lifestyle and our industrial loads in response to the weather. But this is not a desirable approach or outcome. If we don’t want the weather to increasingly impact what we do and when in our homes and factories, we should aim to build an energy system that isn’t completely dependent on it.
Aidan Morrison is energy program director at the Centre for Independent Studies.

Read that very last line again, and marvel at the way that the reptiles manage to avoid mentioning climate science, climate change and the way that the planet is currently heading to hell in an over-warmed basket ...

You know, if we don't want climate change to increasingly impact on what we do and when in our homes and factories and lives, maybe we shouldn't indulge so much in CIS bullshit.

Sadly all this meant that the pond was unable to convey seasonal greetings to its (likely few) American readers:

And the pond must ignore some delicious scribbling, as offered by Charles P. Pierce in Esquire, Trump's Nominee to Lead Anti-Terrorism Is Chief Whackadoo 'Doctor' Sebastian Gorka, As a government official, he's a pretty good radio host:

Back where I come from, we have men who are called heroes. Once a year, they take their fortitude out of mothballs and parade it down the main street of the city. —The Wizard of Oz

Out of what seems to be the endless parade of whackadoos, smackbrains, rockheads, fanatics, lunatics, and general shit-for-brains that has been following El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago ever since he rode down the escalator and sent the American idea of self-government on an express escalator to hell, none have been more ridiculous than “Doctor” Sebastian Gorka. Remember when Newt Gingrich got caught doodling notes of himself as “leader (perhaps) of the civilizing forces”? Well, ol’ Seb believes he already has the gig.
Gorka is one of those people who found in the 9/11 attacks the golden ticket to media fame. A Hungarian security specialist, he wandered around the shadowland of intelligence work and right-wing media until he filtered into this country’s intelligence intelligentia. He copped a White House job in the first Trump administration thanks to the intervention of convicted felon Steve Bannon. His tenure on the Strategic Initiatives Group, a make-work operation for Jared Kushner, lasted four months. He also could be counted on to liven up media events. After leaving the White House, he did what any wing-nut international man of mystery would do. He took a job with Fox News and started his own radio talk show. He spread so much misinformation on YouTube that they banned him from the platform. He thereupon slid down the wing-nut food chain until he had his own show on NewsMax.
Okay, so far that doesn’t distinguish him from a host of other folks in the terminal phase of the prion disease. But let us move on now to the Order of Vitez, a hereditary Hungarian honor granted to Gorka’s father for having resisted the Soviet occupation of that country. When Paul Gorka died, the honor passed to his son, who has glommed onto it for all it was worth.
There is considerable evidence that the Order of Vitez wasn’t exactly neutral during World War II. The State Department was so convinced of its connections to the Nazi occupation and enabling the Holocaust that it put the Order on a list of Nazi-affiliated organizations throughout Europe. Gorka appears to have clung to the Order primarily to play dress-up on Fox News. I mean, honest to God, look at this guy. This is what I imagine Franz Ferdinand would have looked like had Gavrilo Princip been a lousy shot.
While Gorka’s connection to anti-Semitism may be largely restricted to his choice in formal accessorizing, he has left no doubt of his feelings toward Islam, which can be found somewhere to right of those of Pope Urban I. And his public remarks have always leaned into rhetoric not that far removed from the Crusades, which, as we have learned from defense nominee Pete Hegseth, have a certain vogue among religious (white) nationalists. Not surprisingly, this has led Gorka to the worst elements of Christian history. Historian Rick Perlstein points us to a quote from Gorka during one of his chats with Steve Bannon.

"Yes, we’re Christians. Yes, we believe that all men are made in the image of our creator. But at the same time we understand that evil is real, that evil lurks in the hearts of man. We are not the lambs of the Bible; that is Jesus, our savior. We are to turn over the tables of the money lenders. We are there when he calls, “Sell everything you own and buy a sword.” That is the Christianity we believe in. Turn the other face is not the message that we believe in. The message of Christ is truth in God. And as a result, I have to say this unequivocally to everyone listening, and it may be tough for some people who think that the church is some Sunday social club, but this administration is evil. And I mean it. In terms of the heart of darkness, black hearts of evil. Because they know what they’re doing … putting in place a legal system that allows anyone—it could be terrorists, it could be the cartels—to pre-screen and clear themselves as quote-unquote “asylum seekers” … when they get on a plane with my wife, with your daughter."

As a theologian, Sebastian Gorka makes a good radio host. And he has been nominated to be ... wait for it ... your new chief of anti-terrorism...

There's more via the link, including a link to Gorka's favourite form of drag, and yet again the pond was left to wonder how, thanks to its herpetology studies, it was left reading dullards of the our Henry and Morrsion kind when there are great celebrations of whackadoodlery to hand ...

Never mind, we all must suffer, and in the end turn to the infallible Pope for consolation, redemption being a step too far:

What a tragic, terrible accident, but no doubt the reptiles are jumping for joy: