In which the pond indulges the pompous old bigot and then treats itself to a slice of slash and burn with Uncle Leon and Vivek the vivisectionist ...

 

First a little housekeeping. The pond is pleased to report that Graham Readfearn watched the Ughmann's documentary, so that the pond wouldn't have to. It was enough to have covered the Uhgmann carrying on about it.

Spoiler alert, Readfearn ended his report with a killer burn, So now, to transition away from coal, we should be using … more coal? If you think that doesn’t make sense, you’re probably not alone.

Actually if you live in the bizarro world of the reptile hive mind, as the pond does on a daily basis, it makes perfect sense.

Meanwhile, much happened over night. Gaetz was gone, a tragedy to legacy media and bloggers around the world. 

And the price of ordering a genocide turned out to be a minor inconvenience and irritation regarding travel arrangements. Poor Benji ...

And The Bulwark turned up another RFK Jr. conspiracy, one of the pond's favourites - RFK Jr. on Chemtrails: ‘I Am Persuaded’, down there with alien probing.

As often happens, Luckovich was on hand to celebrate:

Is it pedantic to quibble with the wording? The pond would have liked the full homage. What with his bear- and whale-wrangling credentials, the pond is sure RFK Jr. would have given his monkey bats a proper Simpsons' send-off:

At the bottom of The Bulwark's piece were two very moving tributes to real man Jesse (with a name like that any Freudian would understand the psychology at work).

Oh it's going to be a great four years, or more, with real men of the Jesse kind ...

But then reality came crashing down around the pond's rather elephantine ears. 

Look at the reptile digital edition this day. Jimbo had poked a stick into the bull ants' nest:

Days after the sticking, the reptiles were still in an almighty uproar, with three commentators and news stories going on about the Future Fund. 

Count 'em in the comments section: there was the bouffant one, lesser half of the Angelic one; and a right Pearler; and a snappy Tom offering.

It was too early for the cry of anti-Semitism in support of genocide to make it into the commentary section, but given the reptile fury, is it any wonder that the pond turned to the quieter backwaters, the fetid swamp, as the bigoted hole in the bucket man decided to catch up with events in Kiwi land, so that he too might enjoy a bit of dinkum Māori bashing.

Steady, not just the Māoris.

They simply provided a splendid excuse for our Henry to indulge in all kinds of first peoples bashing - there's never been an other or a minority he hasn't loved bashing. 

It's a five minute read, so the reptiles say, but you can't expect bigotry done on the cheap or in too short a time. 

Let the bashing begin, under the header, Grievance treaties don’t heal injustice, they create it, As New Zealand grapples with the legacy of Waitangi, the Albanese government remains committed to negotiating a treaty. Should it come to pass, the real injustice will be to Australia’s future, rather than to our past.

The piece began with a snap identifying those ripe for a bashing by bigots, Hikoi members leave Waitangi Park and walk along the streets heading towards Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand.

What a shocking sight for fragile white warriors of the Henry kind.

Uppity difficult folk haveing been featured, let the pompous, portentous, suitably arcane and pretentious historical references begin:

As New Zealand tears itself apart over the legacy of Waitangi, the fate of that treaty and of the American Indian treaties in North America contains many lessons for Australia.
Treaties are, of course, hardly a recent development, any more than is their use for territorial expansion. Centuries ago, Cicero listed them in On Duties (De Officiis) as one of the major ways in which territory could be legitimately acquired. But even then, they were far from uncontentious, with Polybius exemplifying their shortcomings by the treaties between Rome and Carthage, whose ambiguities stoked the very wars they were intended to avoid.

Hang on, hang on, the pond can't let that Cicero quote go unnoticed. 

What with the second Gladiator out and about, the pond had especially saved this Beast reference for Our Henry Day:

‘Like Ancient Rome’: CNN Panel Mocks Trump’s UFC Outing With ‘Gladiator’ Cabinet Picks
HIS ROMAN EMPIRE
The panelist Marc Caputo compared Trump’s appearance in New York to Roman emperors watching gladiators fight (Beast paywall)

Take that Mr Cicero, stuff a gladiator in your pipe and smoke it, and see how high you get ...

What a pity our Henry didn't attend the Coliseum, and instead, it was back to the wanker supreme trotting out more references.

Nonetheless, the deeply ingrained legalism of medieval and early modern Europe helped place treaties at the heart of relations between princes. Moreover, the Reformation heightened their importance during the Age of Exploration, as it swept away the papal bulls that had previously served to legitimate overseas conquests.
That period, which broadly went from the 16th century to the end of the 18th century, saw a fundamental transformation in the status of treaties. At its outset, the distinction between treaties and contracts was extremely blurred. Made in the name of their signatories, treaties could be entered into by subordinates, such as feudal lords, as well as by monarchs.
That changed, however, with the emergence of what became the modern state, and of the concept of sovereignty with it. 

At this point the reptiles interrupted with their favourite tame pet: Shadow Indigenous Australians Minister Jacinta Nampijinpa Price discusses the “weaponisation” of the cultural heritage act and the impacts of Indigenous Treaty across the nation. “There is some hope we will see how the crossbench fares,” Ms Price said. “They do need to keep in mind this also affects the … possible impact of Treaty across our country.”

The pedantic, pompous bore ploughed on with his arcane evocation of nonsensical irrelevancies dredged from the sludge:

Just as in republican Rome a treaty required Senate approval, so, beginning with Henry V’s treaty with Sigismund in 1413, treaties increasingly invoked the authority of the nation, bestowed not solely by the monarch but through ratification by parliaments or estates. Hugo Grotius, writing in 1625, could therefore define a treaty as “a contract of sovereigns”, excluding agreements reached by or with sub-national entities.
Additionally, and importantly, the production of compilations of treaties – starting with Jacques Bernard’s Compendium in 1700 – encouraged their standardisation, aided by the acceptance of French as the lingua franca of diplomacy. As European diplomats came to share a conceptual framework, the groundwork was laid for the proliferation of interstate treaties in the 19th century.
Unfortunately, the factors that facilitated treaty-making within the West were irrelevant to relations between European colonisers and indigenous peoples. Grotius had authoritatively stated that “the right of making alliances is common to all men”; but that did nothing to ensure the colonial treaties were understood by those who signed them – or that their translations reflected a common appreciation of the treaties’ implications.
Nor was their continuing legal significance apparent, all the more so as the chieftains invariably abdicated any claim to sovereignty, undermining the treaties’ standing.
It is therefore unsurprising that John Marshall, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, could, in the landmark case of Cherokee Nation v Georgia (1831), call them an anomaly, “marked by peculiar distinctions which exist nowhere else”. While accepting that the Cherokees were “a distinct political society”, he found that they were, in legal terms, no more than “a domestic dependent nation”, whose treaties were “completely under the sovereignty and dominion of the United States”. 

At this point, the pond simply had to interrupt. 

The pond appreciates and understands that primitive folk are designed to be bludgeoned to death by our Henry's astonishing range of historical references (or more prosaically by guns and poisoned flour), but really he does put a little skew on that Georgia case. 

If you consult John Marshall's wiki (which has footnotes), you can read this summary of the matter:

In the 1823 case of Johnson v. McIntosh, the Marshall Court had established the supremacy of the federal government in dealing with Native American tribes. In the late 1820s, the state of Georgia stepped up efforts to assert its control over the Cherokee within state borders, with the ultimate goal of removing the Cherokee from the state. After Georgia passed a law that voided Cherokee laws and denied several rights to the Native Americans, former Attorney General William Wirt sought an injunction to prevent Georgia from exercising sovereignty over the Cherokee. The Supreme Court heard the resulting case of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831. Writing for the Court, Marshall held that Native American tribes constituted "domestic dependent nations," a new legal status, but he dismissed the case on the basis of standing.

In short, what Marshall was trying to do was provide a basis for honouring the status and treaties that the federal government had entered into with assorted first nations. There was another case with some bearing on the matter:

At roughly the same time that the Supreme Court issued its decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, a group of white missionaries living with the Cherokee were arrested by the state of Georgia. The State did so on the basis of an 1830 state law that prohibited white men from living on Native American land without a state license. Among those arrested was Samuel Worcester, who, after being convicted of violating the state law, challenged the constitutionality of the law in federal court. The arrest of the missionaries became a key issue in the 1832 presidential election, and one of the presidential candidates, William Wirt, served as the attorney for the missionaries. On March 3, 1832, Marshall delivered the opinion of the Court in the case of Worcester v. Georgia. The Court's holding overturned the conviction and the state law, holding that the state of Georgia had improperly exercised control over the Cherokee.  It is often reported that in response to the Worcester decision President Andrew Jackson declared "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" More reputable sources recognize this as a false quotation.Regardless, Jackson refused to enforce the decision, and Georgia refused to release the missionaries. The situation was finally resolved when the Jackson administration privately convinced Governor Wilson Lumpkin to pardon the missionaries.

None of that impinges on our Henry's desire to do what they did in the United States, which was to refute, unilaterally alter, or ignore assorted treaties, mount a massive land grab and herd indigenous Americans onto reservations. 

It was a sordid tale of massacres, ethnic cleansing, enslavement, forced assimilation, and so on, and naturally our Henry thinks that it's a splendid model to emulate ... and so to a bit of flag waving:

New Zealand ACT Leader David Seymour calls into question the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, claiming everyone in the country has a “right to say about its future”. “For a very long time, a huge number of people have been told unless you’re a self-appointed expert, a treaty lawyer, an Iwi leader, then you don’t have a role to play in interpreting the Treaty of Waitangi,” Mr Seymour said. “We actually need to be a country that is modern and mature, multi-ethnic, has a place for everybody, and everybody has a right to say about its future. What we have just done today is open that whole debate about the treaty up to everyone.”

What's the point of a treaty if it's up to everyone to debate it? 

Next thing you know you get pompous loons of the Henry kind saying that treaties don't matter, and if anybody's going to parley, with useless justifying arcane references dug up from his book of quotes, it's going to be him:

Chief Justice James Pendergast of New Zealand echoed that view when he ruled in 1877 that “the pact known as the ‘Treaty of Waitangi’ must be regarded as a simple nullity”.
And Labour prime minister Michael Savage confirmed it in 1939, stating that despite frequent references to the treaty as New Zealand’s Magna Carta, “the Treaty of Waitangi creates no rights cognisable in a court of law”. But in this area, like many others, the 1960s turned the world upside down. Indigenous activism exploded; so did judicial activism; and left-leaning governments followed suit.
In 1966, a powerful dissent by Justice (later Chief Justice) John Cartwright of the Supreme Court of Canada heralded the change, not only by breathing new life into old treaties but also by completely ignoring the traditional rules, set down in international law, of treaty interpretation.
Central to this new approach was the rediscovery of Sir Edward Coke’s concept of “the Honour of the Crown”, which the great Elizabethan jurist had articulated in 1613. Almost entirely forgotten since then, it imposed on the Crown the highest standard of conduct, as assessed by the court, even if the conduct it prescribed went well beyond what was convenient, required by law or reasonably likely in the circumstances.
Gradually establishing itself after Cartwright’s 1966 dissent as the dominant normative standard in Canadian Indian treaty cases, the “Honour of the Crown” entered the Waitangi Treaty’s interpretation as judge-made law in 1987. But it was only some years after the Treaty of Waitangi Act of 1985, which empowered the until then largely toothless Waitangi Tribunal to investigate claims dating back to 1840, that the consequences of imposing a much higher standard on the Crown’s relation to indigenous people than on its relation to other citizens became fully apparent.
As historian Ruth Ross had noted in 1972, only so much burden could be borne by a treaty that was “hastily drawn up, ambiguous and contradictory in content, chaotic in its execution”. But the Tribunal was imbued with its mission of correcting historical wrongs.
It therefore decided to hold the Crown to the highest conceivable standard of conduct and – showing scant regard for causation – considered it solely responsible for the result of any shortcomings from that standard. It also determined that in defining the ideal conduct, the many ambiguities and inconsistencies in the Treaty were to be resolved to the claimants’ benefit, thus breaching the longstanding doctrine that treaties should be interpreted neutrally as between the parties. 

At this point the reptiles interrupted with two huge snaps of Winston Peters and Megan Davism, downsized to a more gainly shape by the pond:

After that visual distraction, our Henry spluttered to a close, outraged at the way these uppity, difficult indigenous folk refuse to accept what's good for them. 

Wise historical references from their paternal, caring father:

And when the documentary evidence (typically amounting to many metres of shelf space) didn’t suit the resulting narrative, it felt free to dismiss it, as in Muriwhenua Land (1997), for “presenting only a European point of view”. Those “self-serving” European explanations were, it said, to be replaced by a “Maori world-view”, which the Tribunal implausibly assumed had remained unchanged for centuries.
Finally, having thus proven that bad history, like bad currency, drives out good, it would construct, as the basis for determining the compensation that was due, a shining past-that-could-have-been-had-the-government-acted-properly, in a fiction rightly derided by historian Bill Oliver as a “retrospective utopia”.
However, the greatest harm the Treaty has caused does not lie in the sweeping rights and taxpayers’ funds handed over to claimants. It lies in the sacralisation of a backward-looking culture of grievance. As Winston Peters, who opposed the initial legislation, warned years ago, such a system was a recipe not for progress but for creating “a bitter and divided nation with separate systems for Maori and non-Maori” – as it plainly has.
Yet despite that experience, the Albanese government, trapped in an idea-clot, remains committed to negotiating a treaty. That treaty, Megan Davis tells us, must be “about reparations for past injustices”. Should it come to pass, the real injustice will be to Australia’s future, which surely deserves better.

And so, after enduring the bashing, on to a treat for the pond's particular pleasure. 

This one came out earlier in the WSJ, and turned up in potted form at The Beast, Musk Floats DOGE Plan to Scrap Remote Work for Federal Employees

Naturally the reptiles couldn't resist borrowing it from the WSJ, and while it's a little late and a five minute read, here it is under the header The DOGE plan to reform government, Reducing regulations, as we plan, means mass headcount reductions. Requiring staff to come to the office 5 days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we will welcome, by those billionaire oligarchs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

It was a whole lot more than reporting to the office with a mattress, after eating coal at four am ready for full work day ending at 1 am.

Naturally there were head shots of the oligarchic billionaires (though maybe Vivek clocks in at $800-960m, enough to make him a dinkum billionaire in Oz play money) - Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy vow sweeping reforms to the US government bureaucracy:

The pond appreciates that the new word of the day for the arriving regime is Kakistocracy, but the pond still prefers "oligarch", with its fragrant evocation of Vlad the Sociopath's regime. 

It will be remembered that many oligarchs made a fortune and then stumbled when Vlad turned wrathful, and the pond is taking bets on exactly how long Uncle Leon and Vivek the vivisectionist will last before Emperor Donald I will turn on them.

Not to worry, all is sunlight at the moment, and the pair got down to slashing and burning, while the pond stood well clear:

Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats — tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.
This is anti-democratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision. It imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers. Thankfully, we have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On November 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it.
President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.

At one point Uncle Leon spruiked that he was going to trim a tidy US$2 trillion out of a federal budget of some US$6.7 trillion, a fine fantasy ...

Oh they might rail at NPR but the reptiles had the answer - slash all the other parts of government, but make sure there are enough cardigan wearers to do the paperwork for Uncle Leon's grants ...

Filmmaker Ami Horowitz slams the “left outrage” at Elon Musk’s involvement with the US government. US President-elect Donald Trump watched SpaceX’s successful starship test flight launch. “Elon Musk didn’t build three businesses, he built three industries,” Mr Horowitz told Sky News host Rita Panahi. “This is a guy that’s being demonised because they hate … private enterprise – they want the government not to be streamlined.”

Yes, this is a guy who wants to do to the Feds what he's done to Twitter ... Down 80%: Fidelity says X has plummeted in value since Elon Musk's takeover. 

Inspirational, Ami, a bloody great industry of far white nationalism, and neo-Nazi extremism and punters fleeing for the hills.

But the pond digresses, it's on with the slashing and the burning, and mattresses in the offices for the lucky few survivors:

We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the US Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden’s tenure.
In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the justices held that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorises them to do so. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the court overturned the Chevron doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rule-making authority. Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.

The reptiles were big on AV content for this brand of pie in the sky:

President-elect Donald Trump was seen attending SpaceX’s starship launch alongside close friend and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The starship launch on Tuesday was a historic moment, with Trump being the first-ever US president to watch a SpaceX launch. Upon arriving at the launch site in Texas, Musk greeted the president-elect before speaking to him and others about the launch. The time came for the launch, with President-elect Trump, Republican Senator Ted Cruz and others watching on. The launch prompted many on social media to share their opinions, with X users noting how “proud” Trump was of Musk. “President Trump looked super proud of his friend Elon Musk and of America as that SpaceX rocket lifted off,” wrote one user. “American excellence is being displayed on the world stage yet again.”

More grand words and promises followed, what a dreaming it was ...

DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.
When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorised by Congress. The president owes lawmaking deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within federal agencies. The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront, but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.
A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.
Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into the private sector. The president can use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.

Conventional wisdom holds that statutory civil-service protections stop the president or even his political appointees from firing federal workers. The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from political retaliation. But the statute allows for “reductions in force” that don’t target specific employees.

As for the pond's betting on how long the mango Mussolini and Uncle Leon would stay bonded, unfortunately the odds shortened with the news that Sharri, full disrespect, thought that they were joined at the hip: 

Sky News host Sharri Markson says Donald Trump and Elon Musk are “joined at the hip”. Ms Markson said the pair are promising to “shake things up” within the US government. Sky News contributor Kosha Gada joined Ms Markson to discuss Donald Trump’s new dream team.

Relax, it's  just a bit of cross-promotion for Sky News (Au), a bit of synergistic brand integration for the hive mind, as they say in marketing textboks. 

Just possibly Sharri might be wrong, it might be worth having a flutter at the notion that the pair won't last a year (you can spring into action if you have the readies):

The statute further empowers the president to “prescribe rules governing the competitive service.” That power is broad. Previous presidents have used it to amend the civil service rules by executive order, and the Supreme Court has held — in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992) and Collins v. Yellen (2021) that they weren’t constrained by the Administrative Procedures Act when they did so.
With this authority, Mr Trump can implement any number of “rules governing the competitive service” that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area. Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.
Finally, we are focused on delivering cost savings for taxpayers. Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorised by Congress. Mr Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.
But even without relying on that view, DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorised by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organisations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.

Hmm, those numbers are a bit shy of US$2 trillion, but it's the thought that counts, with Vivek the  vivisectionist finally getting his turn at the clashing and the burning:

Vivek Ramaswamy promises a “sweeping change” as he and Elon Musk will lead the Department of Government Efficiency. During an interview with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, Ramaswamy explained what the vision of the new department will be. Ramaswamy promised aggressive cost-cutting measures would begin with executive action to allow Congress to do its part, as reported by Fox News. “The failures of the executive branch need to be addressed because the dirty little secret right now is the people we elect to run the government, they're not the ones who actually run the government,” he said. “It's the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state that was created through executive action. It's going to be fixed through executive action.”

Splendid stuff, and with the federal government in tatters, it was time to wrap things up, though some might wonder why a ball-kicking wrestling woman has been nominated as education secretary when the whole department is scheduled for demolition:

The federal government’s procurement process is also badly broken. Many federal contracts have gone unexamined for years. Large-scale audits conducted during a temporary suspension of payments would yield significant savings. The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent. Critics claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which require Congress to shrink. But this deflects attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end — and that DOGE aims to address by identifying pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.
With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government. We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action. Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026 — the expiration date we have set for our project. There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud.
The Wall St Journal

Excellent first rate stuff, and there was a sign of what was to follow with this story of bickering billionaires ...

Oh the court of King Donald 1 is going to be up there with Henry VIII, with the pond taking bets not just on how last it all lasts, but on whether Uncle Leon will turn into Thomas Cromwell ...

Cromwell was arraigned under an act of attainder (32 Hen. 8. c. 62) and executed for treason and heresy on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540. The King later expressed regret at the loss of his chief minister and his reign never recovered from the incident. (wiki)

Oh regrets, likely he'll have too few to mention ...

Once again in closing, the pond unfortunately finds no way to segue to the immortal Rowe and the infallible Pope, what with having passed up on the chance to do intertubes and Future Fund stories, but that's no reason to start the day without them ...