Lloydie of the Amazon and the Angelic one's lesser half are present, but it's the Lynch mob who saves the reptiles' honour ...

 

For some reason, the bouffant one, aka the lesser half of the Angelic one, seems to have gained a third wind, and led off the alleged news in the digital edition of the lizard Oz, together with news of reptile surprise that anyone should pay attention to the ongoing genocide in Gaza ...

Shanners was also on hand in the comments section, fulminating away, but it was the return of Lloydie of the Amazon to address the issue that had the pond cock-a-hoop with excitement ...

And why not be wildly excited?

Of course the pond was going to read Lloydie, top of the far right digital world ma, especially as the alternatives included Dame Slap rabbiting on about juries in her usual tedious way ... but, spoiler alert, the pond was soon to be hugely disappointed.

Even the reptiles rated the outing a mere two minute read ...

Energy Minister Chris Bowen pulling us out of nuclear just as everyone jumps in, The Albanese government is sabotaging Australia’s longstanding and deep involvement in next-generation nuclear research, just as the world is getting serious about the emissions-free technology.

The opening snap wasn't encouraging, especially as it was the only one. (Apparently the reptiles couldn't be bothered finding an image to nuke the story). Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen at the launch of COP29 Azerbaijan. Picture: Renewable Energy Council Asia Pacific/Facebook

Yes, yes, we readers of reptiles know what Satan looks like, get on with it ...

The Albanese government is sabotaging Australia’s longstanding and deep involvement in next-generation nuclear research, just as the world is getting serious about the emissions-free technology.
We have been an active member of the world’s leading small-scale nuclear research group but not, it seems, anymore.
Chris Bowen has effectively said he will pull Australia out of the Generation IV International Forum (GIF) just as it moves from research to deployment phase and our major allies pour billions of dollars into research and development.
The GIF was established in 2001 as a co-operative inter­national endeavour seeking to test the feasibility and performance of fourth-generation nuclear systems, and to make them available for industrial deployment by 2030. It brings together 13 countries – Argentina, Australia, ­Brazil, Canada, China, France, Japan, Korea, Russia, South ­Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States – as well as the European Atomic Energy Community, representing the 27 EU members.
The Australian flag is displayed on the cover of the GIF’s 2023 annual report. Our involvement is detailed in a full page. Our contribution involves research into high-temperature reactor projects, along with contributing research in support of molten salt reactor projects.
The annual report said Australia “continues to be a committed and co-operative member of the Generation IV International Forum for the joint development of the next generation of nuclear technology, which is vital for the future of the nuclear energy industry and for the sustainable development of the planet”.
It says that while Australian government policy continues to prohibit the civilian use of nuclear energy in the country, “it continues to recognise that nuclear ­energy is a mature technology used to deliver reliable electricity in many countries, with zero greenhouse-gas emissions at the point of generation and low life-cycle emissions”.
It says the AUKUS security partnership with the UK and US will enable Australia to leverage nuclear-powered submarine expertise.
“Announcements by the Australian government in early 2023 indicated continuing support for the program, including the formation of a dedicated agency to manage Australia’s efforts,” the report said.
The GIF said a focus for Australia in its role as a member of the forum continued to be “the mutual benefits reaped from international co-operation in programs that underpin the next generation of nuclear technology”.
The existing GIF framework agreement expires on February 28 next year and the policy group agreed in 2023 to develop a new framework agreement for those parties mutually willing to continue collaborations. Russia is being excluded from the new group.
Bowen’s comments on Tuesday make it clear we are getting out of the nuclear business at a time when our major allies are preparing to double down.

Yep, that's all he wrote ... what on earth is going on in the Amazon with Lloydie?

And so the pond turned to the Angelic one's lesser half in the hope of discovering a better level of rage. 

The bouffant one promised much, what with "climate zealotry" in the header, and the promise of a three minute read: Chris Bowen’s rebuffing of Ed Miliband’s UK-US civil nuclear pact reveals Labor’s climate zealotry, Chris Bowen’s argument against joining the US and Britain’s civil nuclear pact is, put simply: London has only 1633 hours of sunshine on average. Rainy Melbourne has 2362 hours, and sunny Perth has 3229.

Tragically, the bouffant one's effort was littered with meaningless snaps, beginning with an obscure British leftist, UK Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband speaks at the UK pavilion at the UNFCCC COP29 Climate Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. Picture: Getty Images

The illustrations began to flow and to look increasingly weird. First a little text flinging about puerile:

The Albanese government’s argument for rejecting a UK Labour and US Democratic Party appeal to join a global move to speed up the spread of civilian nuclear energy and cut carbon emissions has left Labor looking contradictory, confused and embarrassed.
The invitation from Australia’s closest allies and AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine partners has also confirmed the ALP’s zealotry and ideologically driven climate change policies.
What’s more, the arguments put forward by Richard Marles and Chris Bowen for rebuffing the invitation to join the UK, US and more than 30 other leading nations were, respectively, unconvincing about the need for Australian expertise in nuclear industry and, frankly, puerile in arguing that even Melbourne is “sunnier” than London.

Yes, yes, but that weird snap please ... Chris Bowen and Austrian Minister for Climate Action Leonore Gewessler at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Picture: Instagram @lgewessler

You'd think the reptiles would have at least cropped out that reference to the highlight of the day, the presentation of the Net Zero Industries Award, with said award signalling unseemly climate zealotry. Why the mere mention of the concept of net zero, let alone an award for same, can set some reptiles off into a frothing, foaming, frenzy.

Then came just a couple of pars ...

There’s no doubt UK Energy Minister Ed Miliband dropped the Albanese government into the radioactive waste when he publicly declared Australia was “expected” to join the UK and the US as “allies” in the enhanced civilian nuclear proposal, but the response was, again, ill-prepared, illogical and condescending.
What Miliband did was raise an expectation Australia would go beyond its existing “observer” status on the international forum and force the Energy Minister and Acting Prime Minister into the open to justify refusing to talk about nuclear energy based on policy grounds.

... followed by another snap of Satan, as if the reptiles were acting as Satan's publicity handlers,  Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen during a meeting with ministerial pairs at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Picture: UN Climate Change/Kiara Worth

Why is the pond obsessed with the snaps? Well, the Angelic one's lesser half might be feeling his horsey oats, but the porridge he served up was tediously predictable, oats for the hive mind ...

There was also the political context where, within 24 hours of launching a pre-election personal attack on Peter Dutton and the Coalition’s proposed nuclear energy policy, Labor was scrambling to recover from the confusion and contradictions in rejecting the allies’ appeal.
The UK and US set out a perfectly logical and compelling argument for an enhanced climate change policy of speeding up civilian nuclear energy to cut carbon emissions, provide secure, firm power and encourage industry to create jobs and prosperity while decarbonising their processes.
It was an eloquent argument for developing nuclear power that forced the Labor Party to address the policy and the politics.
“Nuclear will play a vital role in our clean-energy future. That is why we are working closely with our allies to unleash the potential of cutting-edge nuclear technology,” Miliband said.

For peculiar reasons, the pond actually heard the mutton Dutton blathering on, "eloquently", and yet the matter of costs for an industry, which in Australia, unlike the US or the UK, would be a start-up, were never mentioned. 

We're still waiting and if you go looking all you can find are ancient worries ... all to do with those unmentionable costs ...

Where is the perfectly logical and compelling argument, the eloquent argument in relation to costs as a reason to abandon renewables, and attempt a hugely expensive nuking of the country to save the planet? 

Crickets, but here's another snap of that obscure gung ho leftist, a strange infatuation for the reptiles... UK Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband. Picture: Getty Images

Apparently the reptiles now have extraordinary faith in a UK leftist who doesn't much mind matters of cost, at least if the costs have nothing to do with the wretched state of the UK budget ...

In parliament Marles said Labor would not be signing the agreement because we “don’t have a civilian nuclear industry”. Marles ridiculed the Opposition Leader for wanting to just burn a piece of uranium to make power.
But, as Defence Minister last year announcing the Australian participation in the nuclear-powered submarine program, Marles boasted about 20,000 civilian jobs in South and Western Australia as the government geared up for the submarine project, including training, skills, exchanges with the US and the UK, and university places.

That's apparently the best the reptiles have got. Nuke the subs, so we must nuke the country, and and now we must pause for another snap, this time Satan's deputy, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles. Picture: Kym Smith

This apples and pears routine about nuking the subs means we must nuke the country doesn't make any sense. 

The pond isn't inherently adverse to the notion of nuking the country if it happened to be cost-effective up against renewables, and feasible in the time span, but we never get any of the hard details, just emotive blather of the bouffant one kind ...

Tens of thousands of jobs depend on the proposed AUKUS nuclear submarine project and yet there is “no civilian nuclear industry” in Australia.
Bowen’s response from Baku was worse politically: a flat-out “no” to the signing and, as if the nuclear ban in Australia is like the Ten Commandments and written in stone, a nuclear industry was “outlawed”.
Bowen then proposed that Australia is much sunnier than the UK and has advantages with solar power that the UK does not and therefore small nuclear reactors were unviable in Australia.
The argument was: Put simply, London has only 1633 hours of sunshine in an average year. By comparison, Australia’s least sunny capital city is Melbourne with 2362 hours, while our sunniest capital city, Perth, has 3229.
Hence, solar panels would answer Australia’s energy needs without recourse to nuclear.
Of course, Great Britain is smaller than Victoria and doesn’t have the transmission challenges of a nation at least 20 times larger and the oil-producing desert state of the United Arab Emirates, which has even more sunshine, has embarked on nuclear power.
Cost of living, particularly the cost of energy, is going to dominate the election campaign, and Labor is going to have to get its story straight on nuclear and Dutton if it hopes to do better than this week.

Actually the reptiles are going to have to get their story straight on nuking the country if they hope to get it done. 

Start with the costs and a feasible implementation plan. The pond is patiently standing by, ready and willing to install that SMR in the backyard at the drop of a hat ...

It was left to the Lynch mob to restore some respectable craziness to the reptile slate, with Why can’t the left produce successful women leaders like the right?,Julia Gillard said her exit from politics was inexplicable without taking gender into account. So too did Hillary Clinton in 2016. Perhaps the more obvious reason is that the progressive faith in gender before talent has given us women who just aren’t very good.

Accordingly to the reptiles it was a five minute read, and the crazy was strong, and reminded the pond of the deep sense of pity it feels for the Lynch mob students.

It began in usual reptile way with the figure to be demonised ...Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In a way the pond felt frustrated, what with there being so much crazy doing the rounds - the pond had wanted to slip in a mention of that third rate provincial lawyer and professional humbug, Morning Joe, who recently headed south to Florida to kiss King Donald I's ring and then dressed it up as if he'd been at the Yalta conference (credit John Berman). 

After all that talk of fascism and Adolf, it was time, Neville style, to wave a scrap of paper in front of the cameras. What a pathetic excuse for a human bean, but thanks to the change to daylight saving, and a lack of desire, the pond can now avoid the pirated versions of the show dropped on to YouTube.

And then there was Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims in Popular Information offering 13 things everyone should know about Pete Hegseth. 

The crazy is strong in that one, just a sampling will do:

Hegseth said the United Nations should be shut down
In a May 28, 2020, video, Hegseth said the United Nations should be eliminated:
Stop debating about, like, do we do a little bit less at the U.N.? No. Just get rid of the U.N. Just get rid of it. It is a poisoned body, it is an anti-American, anti-Israel, antisemitic institution that's now bonds together to gang up on us, to gang up on the West. And what use does it have?
Hegseth has a tattoo associated with white nationalists. 

Hegseth has a tattoo on his bicep that says "Deus Vult," Latin for "God wills it."

The phrase, which has its roots in the First Crusade, has been appropriated as a rallying cry for white supremacists. The tattoo, according to the Associated Press, resulted in Hegseth being "pulled by his District of Columbia National Guard unit from guarding Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration" because he was viewed as a possible "insider threat." Hegseth acknowledged he was excluded, but claimed it was because he had tattoos with Christian imagery. 
Hegseth is a member of a Christian supremacist church
Hegseth is a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). Doug Wilson, CREC’s founder, openly ascribes to Christian nationalism, wrote a book praising the antebellum South as an idyllic multiracial Christian society, and said that women should not have the right to vote. Wilson and his wife have written books implying that rape within marriage is impossible and several women in Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho church community have accused him of protecting their abusers.
Hegseth has been reported to be in good standing with the church. He is also involved with the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a Christian private school network co-founded by Wilson. His children attend a school in the network and he co-authored a book in 2022 with the network’s president, David Goodwin, about how such schools can save kids from leftist indoctrination in “government schools” and elite universities. Hegseth has degrees from Princeton and Harvard.

But no, the pond must make do with a standard serve of misogyny from the Prof ... 

Here the pond suggests that if there's someone who has never seen it, this is obligatory viewing to create the right mood ...

 

Now read the Prof's version ...

 In the US presidential election campaign there were several decisive moments when you knew Donald Trump had won it, and Kamala Harris had lost it. What was yours?
The “Harris is for they/them; Trump is for you” viral ad? The refusal of Harris to podcast with Joe Rogan? Trump’s “Fight! Fight! Fight!”? Harris not being able to explain how her presidency would differ from Joe Biden’s?
In my home, it was when the Democrats aired the commercial they called “Julia Roberts Reminds Us – Your Vote, Your Choice”. It will be remembered as possibly the most ill-conceived 30 seconds in campaign history.
Two couples are about to enter the semi-privacy of the voting booth. One of the MAGA husbands is certain his wife will do the right thing but encourages her just to be sure: “Your turn, Honey!”
But the two 50-something women, while they are wearing Trump merch, are secretly pro-choice. This is the brilliant Democratic twist.
Using telepathy and a nod, the women vote for Harris-Walz. Their husbands need never know. The right of their daughters to abort any grandchildren moves stealthily a step closer. They will make abortion great again.
“Did you make the right choice?” asks hubby. (“Choice”. Geddit?)
“Sure did, Honey.”
“Remember,” says Roberts, reaching peak condescension, “what happens in the booth, stays in the booth.”

Would that what happens in the Lynch mob's mind stayed in the Lynch mob's mind, but now he was off and racing, with a gigantic video clip to spur him on, As the fallout from Kamala Harris’s brutal loss to Donald Trump continues, all eyes now on the celebrities who supposedly endorsed her. It has since been revealed that these celebrity endorsements may not have been as genuine as they appeared, with new information regarding the big sums of money paid out emerges.

If the pond might be so bold, Harris is now a distant memory, with all that is promised entrancing the world ... you know, so many crazies, so many hints of what's to come...

It might be handy to offer Harris as a distraction from what's currently unfolding, to live in the past of the election campaign, and the Lynch mob shows how it's done by providing TMI on the domestic front ...

My Texan wife, a centre-right Trump sceptic, felt caricatured and infantilised by the ad. While she has never liked Trump, multi-millionaire actress Julia Roberts guaranteed that she would vote for Harris “over my dead body”. And that we can never again watch the Pelican Brief (good film, underrated).
Harris went on to lose women aged 45-64 by a point (49 to 50 per cent). She lost white women by eight points (45 to 53 per cent). She lost white women without a college degree (which we assume were those targeted in the Roberts commercial) by a stunning 28 points (35 to 63 per cent).
How is it that a campaign fronted by a woman of colour had such little appeal with women of pretty much any colour? Compared to Biden in 2020, Harris lost ground among every demographic. Sixty-five per cent of Native Americans voted for Trump. Voice proponents in Australia take note.
In the same week Harris lost the presidential election, another woman of colour, Kemi Badenoch, was elected leader of the British Conservative Party.
The Tories are the most successful electoral machine in European history. Four women have led them. Three have been prime minster. One was a great, world historical figure: Margaret Thatcher. Two have been failures: Theresa May and Liz Truss.
The British right has become comfortable about the sex of its leaders. In contrast, the British Labour Party has never had a woman lead it. But, like progressive parties all over the West, it is obsessed with gender politics. Ditto Australian Labor.

The reptiles were determined to help out, not with a snap of that great promoter of English misery, Maggie, but instead Julia Gillard and Kemi Badenoch. The reptiles set them up and the pond feels compelled to note them:

Yes, the Lynch mob is obsessed with gender politics:

Julia Gillard both bucks and confirms a truth about the left and gender. She was our first/only female PM. But Australians were never quite able (or allowed) to see her without using some gender lens. Her greatest moment was a complaint about Tony Abbott’s misogyny.
When Kevin Rudd toppled her, Gillard said her fate was inexplicable without taking gender into account. Hillary Clinton’s failure in 2016 was similarly excused: Americans were just not ready for a woman president (despite more voters backing her than Donald Trump; she lost in the electoral college). Perhaps the more obvious reason is that the progressive faith in gender before talent has given us women who just aren’t very good and/or aren’t very popular.
Harris was next into the trap set by her base. Unlike Clinton, she was savvy enough to suppress her claims to power based on identity. Like Clinton, she still presented an unpersuasive case for her leadership skills.
I grew up in 1980s Britain. While the left lacked all cohesion, it was united in a deep and enduring hatred of Thatcher. What drove it into frequent two-minute hates was Thatcher’s gender.
When she died in 2013, her left-wing haters declared, vocally and in graffiti: “Ding dong the witch is dead.” If Kemi Badenoch becomes PM, gender will be multiplied by race and the left will demonise her on two metrics. Badenoch will become – for some, she already is – a race and gender traitor.
These identitarian loyalty tests are not applied by the right to its female leaders. Sex and race matter much less to a conservative. “Can she do the job?” is often the first question.

Ah Maggie, cue snap, Margaret Thatcher acknowledges applause at the end of the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool.

Apparently it never occurs to the Lynch mob that it might have been Maggie's policies and their ultimate outcome - the currently impoverished Britain - that might have been the cause of some irritation with Maggie. 

You know:

From the crisis at Thames Water, a company created by her naively pro-monopoly privatisation programme, to the precarity and spiralling cost of renting a home – both products of her curtailment of tenants’ rights and council housing – her policies’ flaws, limits and unforeseen consequences are ever more apparent. Less directly but just as damagingly, her hostility to the EU, to taxing the rich properly, and to most state services except the military, set this country on a path towards today’s European isolation and public and private poverty. Thatcher was elected prime minister largely because she promised to reverse national decline, an approach Starmer is trying to emulate. But along with the Tory successors she so influenced, she can now be seen as having caused such a decline instead.
Why is this so rarely said? The passage of time has certainly helped her reputation. The diminishing amount that is widely remembered about her reign – her victories over the miners and the Argentinians, her electoral landslides, economic boom and commanding manner – has fixed her in the public mind as a divisive but essentially successful prime minister. Her government’s failures and ineffective periods, for instance, the terrible recession that her policies created in the early 80s, or her vain attempts to reverse progress towards racial and sexual equality through reactionary legislation, are largely forgotten. Instead, she has become a free-floating signifier of strong leadership, untethered from much of her actual record.

Strange, no mention of gender in all that, but then the Lynch mob goes on to a category error ...

Yep, pity his poor students, especially if they're in the different and other strands of life, as the Lynch mob hares off down the woke track ...

To be woke is to sacralise women, people of colour, LGBTQI+ people, Indigenous people and the disabled. This has created an impossible standard for an aspiring leader, who happens to belong to any one of these groups, to pass: “they/them” must advance a progressive social justice agenda and be electable. The US presidential election exposed the weakness of this strategy.
The Democrats needed Harris’s race and gender to do the heavy lifting that her basic competencies could not. The ready-made progressive excuse for her electoral wipe-out was that American voters were not worthy of the Era of Joy she would initiate. They were variously too misogynist, deplorable, racist, victims of misinformation … to get on the right side of history.
The sanctimony needed to maintain this interpretation is a big ask. But the left keeps paying it. The consequence is an electoral strategy that does not work. Voters just don’t prioritise identity in the way the left needs them to. Woke politics is an election loser. Progressives cannot easily translate cultural power (in schools, universities, Hollywood and the media) into political power. This drives them nuts.
The dominance numerically of women in schools and universities, for example, should supply endless great left-wing women leaders. It hasn’t yet. Leaders in the European Union increasingly represent a gender parity. But it is the conservative values of women such as Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, Beata Szydło in Poland and Badenoch that confound left-wing identity politics.
How we educate girls might have something to do with this. Progressive educators do a lot of head-patting: “It’s great you march for Palestine!” “Your climate activism is inspirational!” “Smash the patriarchy!” “You go girl!”

It wouldn't be a Lynch mob outing without trotting out another heroine ...Angela Merkel

Sssh, don't mention the state of the Volkswagen, and more generally the German economy, or the wretched uselessness of the country in the face of Russian aggression ... all seeded by Merkel, especially via her love of Russian gas.

In much the same way, it's best to ignore the stacked deck that Harris, black and female, faced as a result of the delusions of an old man, who offered himself as an interregnum leader, and then stayed on the burning deck for far too long, poisoning the chalice for any succession (and incidentally buggered up Gaza and Ukraine in the process) ...

But the pond digresses, and should give space to a final bout of full weirdness and abject crazy from the Prof ...

Young conservative women, on the other hand, must learn how to argue against this faux-liberation orthodoxy. They learn the art of politics and how to lead in a way too many progressive women do not. Conservative women may be fewer in number than their opponents on the left. But they may be better trained.
The great progressive betrayal of progressive women is to render them less resilient. As left-wing doctrines have secured campus dominion – from DEI and decolonisation to safe spaces and preferred pronouns – the mental health of young women has collapsed. There is credible evidence that young conservatives are happier in life than their liberal peers. There is a tragic irony in that.
The centre-right Angela Merkel was schooled in how to survive the infantilisation of East German socialism; she became the most powerful woman in the world.
Harris was raised in the warm bosom of Californian progressivism; she became the weakest presidential candidate in American history – and Julia Roberts’s contracted sanctimony was no help at all.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

The pond has no idea who studies under the Lynch mob, but as the pond has said before, and will keepy saying, they have the pond's deepest sympathies ...

And so to end with a regret ... there was simply no way for the pond to invent a segue to either the immortal Rowe or the infallible Pope of the day, so here they are, ungarnished but still prime ...