Important news for all herpetology students ...

 

The pond was so wildly excited it began to salivate in a most unseemly way, the drool dripping down onto chest. 

It seemed essential to bring the story to the attention of stray pond readers who might have missed it ...

It was the NY Times that brought the good news, essential to all herpetology students, Rupert Murdoch Fails in Bid to Change Family Trust, A Nevada commissioner ruled resoundingly against Mr. Murdoch, who was trying to give full control of his empire to his son Lachlan and lock in Fox News’s right-wing editorial slant. (paywall)

Just the story ma'am, just the story:

A Nevada commissioner ruled resoundingly against Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to change his family’s trust to consolidate his eldest son Lachlan’s control of his media empire and lock in Fox News’s right-wing editorial slant, according to a sealed court document obtained by The New York Times.
The commissioner, Edmund J. Gorman Jr., concluded in a decision filed on Saturday that the father and son, who is the head of Fox News and News Corp., had acted in “bad faith” in their effort to amend the irrevocable trust, which divides control of the company equally among Mr. Murdoch’s four oldest children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence — after his death.
The ruling was at times scathing. At one point in his 96-page opinion, Mr. Gorman characterizes the plan to change the trust as a “carefully crafted charade” to “permanently cement Lachlan Murdoch’s executive roles” inside the empire “regardless of the impacts such control would have over the companies or the beneficiaries” of the family trust.
A lawyer for Mr. Murdoch, Adam Streisand, said that they were disappointed with the ruling and intended to appeal. A lawyer for James, Elisabeth and Prudence did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The battle over the family trust is not about money — Mr. Murdoch is not seeking to diminish any of his children’s financial stakes in the company — but rather about future control of the world’s most powerful conservative media empire, which includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain.
Mr. Murdoch, now 93, has long intended to bequeath these sprawling media conglomerates to his children, much as his own father had passed on his vastly smaller media company to Mr. Murdoch and his sisters. But he is also determined to preserve the right-wing bent of his empire, and reconciling these two desires has become a growing challenge for him.
Over his long career, Mr. Murdoch has made a point of fusing his family and his business affairs, with Lachlan, James and Elisabeth all at one point in consideration to succeed him. (His eldest daughter, Prudence, has been the least involved in the family business.) By 2019, though, it was clear that he wanted Lachlan to lead the company after his death. The problem was the structure of the family trust.
James and Elisabeth are both known to have less-conservative political views than their father or brother. If Mr. Murdoch fails to lock in Lachlan’s leadership of the company, he will be unable to ensure that Fox News will remain a right-wing news outlet after his death, putting in jeopardy the legacy of the conservative empire he had spent his life building. In seeking to consolidate Lachlan’s control over this empire, Mr. Murdoch has argued that maintaining the political bent of his outlets — and stripping the voting power of three of his children — is in the financial interest of all his beneficiaries.
The fight over the trust has further inflamed tensions inside the famously fractious family. Internal disputes have riven the Murdochs before — most notably, during the phone hacking scandal in Britain in 2010 and 2011, when Elisabeth tried to persuade her father to fire James, who was overseeing the company’s British operations at the time.
But this particular battle, which began with a stealth legal maneuver to change an inviolable trust, is unparalleled in the family’s history. It has surfaced decades of shifting ideologies and allegiances, while making Mr. Murdoch’s preference for his eldest son unmistakably and painfully clear to his other children. They have been forced into a courtroom in Nevada to retain some semblance of control over a family business that has become inseparable from the family itself.
The legal maneuvering came to a head during several days of sealed, in-person testimony in Reno in September by Mr. Murdoch, Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, Prudence and a number of their representatives on the trust. The proceedings revealed that Mr. Murdoch’s children had started secretly discussing the public-relations strategy for their father’s death in April 2023. Setting off these discussions was the episode of the HBO drama “Succession,” the commissioner wrote, “where the patriarch of the family dies, leaving his family and business in chaos.” The episode prompted Elisabeth’s representative to the trust, Mark Devereux, to write a “‘Succession’ memo” intended to help avoid a real-life repeat.
The commissioner’s ruling, while significant, is not the final word in the case. The commissioner acts as a “special master” who weighs the testimony and evidence and submits a recommended resolution to the Probate Court. It falls to a district judge to ratify or reject that recommendation. Even then, the losing party is free to challenge the determination, which could precipitate an intensive new round of litigation.
If Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan do not succeed in court, they could pursue other means to consolidate Lachlan’s power. One way would be for Lachlan to buy out his siblings’ stake in the company.
After The Times reported on the legal battle over the family trust in July, the paper, joined by several other news outlets, filed a motion to unseal the proceedings, citing the significant public interest in its outcome. That case is ongoing.
Mr. Murdoch established the Murdoch Family Trust in 2006, years after he had married his third wife, Wendi Deng, and they had two children of their own, Grace and Chloe. Under the trust, he retains control over the business until his death, at which point his voting shares will be distributed equally among his four oldest children.
The initial trust arrangement was meant to be binding, the product of an agreement Mr. Murdoch negotiated with his second wife, Anna — the mother of Lachlan, Elisabeth and James — who was concerned that he would bequeath an equal share of control and equity to the young children he had with Ms. Deng. Those youngest children were ultimately given an equal financial stake in Mr. Murdoch’s multibillion-dollar empire, but no voting power. However, the language of the trust included a provision giving Mr. Murdoch the right to make changes to it as long as he was acting in the best interests of his beneficiaries.
It was that provision that Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan sought to exploit. In recent years, they have grown increasingly concerned that James — who has left the company and is hardly on speaking terms with his father and brother — was planning to lead a coup with Elisabeth and Prudence to oust Lachlan after their father’s death and change the editorial slant of the company. During the proceedings, Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan’s lawyers pointed to a meeting that James, Elisabeth and Prudence held at Claridge’s Hotel in London in September 2023 as proof that they were scheming against Lachlan. But the commissioner ruled that accounts of the meeting were insufficient evidence of “plotting.”
It was Lachlan who initiated the plan to change the trust in the middle of 2023, according to the ruling. His and his father’s lawyers and advisers ultimately drew up a blueprint to consolidate Lachlan’s leadership by amending the trust. They called it — “perhaps too optimistically,” the commissioner quipped — “Project Family Harmony.” It singled out James as the “troublesome beneficiary.”
One of the options contemplated, according to the ruling, was to simply “sever” James’s “sub-trust” from the larger trust, limiting his power. But Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan ultimately decided that they could more effectively marginalize James by keeping his shares in the trust and thus under their control.
Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan appointed new representatives to the family trust — including Bill Barr, the former attorney general — to give them the votes they needed to disenfranchise James, Elisabeth and Prudence. They also offered voting power to the children Mr. Murdoch had with Wendi Deng, according to the ruling.
Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan introduced their plan at a special meeting of the trust late last year. The ruling quotes a text message from Lachlan to Elisabeth on the morning of the meeting: “Today is about Dad’s wishes and confirming all of our support for him and for his wishes. It shouldn’t be difficult or controversial. Love you, Lachlan.”
At the meeting, Mr. Murdoch read a statement that said in part: “I love each of my children, and my support of Lachlan is not intended to suggest otherwise. But these companies need a designated leader and Lachlan is that leader.”
In order for their changes to the trust to pass legal muster, Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan had to prove that they were being done in good faith and with the sole purpose of benefiting all of Mr. Murdoch’s heirs. In court, they argued that locking in Lachlan’s control would ensure that the empire remained on its highly profitable conservative course, which would be in the best interests of all of Mr. Murdoch’s beneficiaries.
James, Elisabeth and Prudence — referred to in the proceedings as the “Objectors” — strenuously disagreed. They argued that they were being disenfranchised from their own family trust under what they maintained was a false presumption. They “disavowed any plan to oust their brother,’’ according to the decision, which also did not find “that they shared any singleness of purpose in changing the management of Fox News,” or other outlets following Mr. Murdoch’s death..
Mr. Gorman sided unequivocally with them, ruling that Mr. Murdoch and his eldest son had ulterior motives — specifically, to give Lachlan the power to protect his father’s posthumous legacy by keeping the family empire on its conservative course. The Nevada commissioner found that they had operated in bad faith, undertaking their plan in secret for months — and only notifying James, Elisabeth and Prudence days before a scheduled vote at a special emergency meeting of the trust’s representatives.
He wrote that Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan’s representatives on the trust, including Mr. Barr, “demonstrated a dishonesty of purpose and motive” in abetting their plan. Mr. Gorman criticizes another one of their newly appointed representatives for his scant knowledge of the family and trust, writing that his research had been limited to “Google searches and watching YouTube videos about the Murdochs (or the fictional family in the show ‘Succession’),” as well as listening to a book by Michael Wolff about the family.
Characterizing the effort to change the trust, Mr. Gorman concludes: “The effort was an attempt to stack the deck in Lachlan Murdoch’s favor after Rupert Murdoch’s passing so that his succession would be immutable. The play might have worked; but an evidentiary hearing, like a showdown in a game of poker, is where gamesmanship collides with the facts and at its conclusion, all the bluffs are called and the cards lie face up.”
He added: “The court, after considering the facts of this case in the light of the law, sees the cards for what they are and concludes this raw deal will not, over the signature of this probate commissioner, prevail.”

Credit where credit is due:

Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, has been writing for the magazine since 2001. More about Jonathan Mahler

Jim Rutenberg is a writer at large for The Times and The New York Times Magazine and writes most often about media and politics. More about Jim Rutenberg

Meanwhile, the pond was vastly relieved to discover that Mein Gott had solved the climate change crisis this very day, in Farming can cut profitably cut emissions, aided by Kennedy Jr and CSIRO, I want to advance a new and profitable way of cutting emissions. And I am aided by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the US and the past work of the CSIRO when it concentrated on science rather than politics.

At first the pond was vaguely disturbed. After reading the reptiles for decades the pond knew in its heart that climate change was a hoax, a cult perpetrated by religious zealots, peddling wild-eyed climate zealotry with alarming zeal, and the only reason to nuke the country was for the sheer hell of it.

The first snap for Mein Gott's piece wasn't encouraging, The Coal River region surrounding Richmond is an award-winning farming and wine producing area with a similar latitude to the famous wine regions of France and Germany.

Sheesh, had the lad gone full Thoreau or Rousseau, should the pond put on Beethoven's 6th symphony to accompany the read?

Nah, it was just another way to have a go at renewables: 

Frontier Economics’ horrendous $660bn estimated 25-year cost of the current state and federal governments’ power generation plan is forcing the nation to reconsider its whole emission strategy.
Today, I want to advance a new and profitable way of cutting emissions. And I am aided by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the US and the past work of the CSIRO when it concentrated on science rather than politics.

Naturally there had to be a snap of the new thought leaders:

Donald Trump has nominated former Republican presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. Picture: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP

Hang on, hang on, Trump Clings to Inaccurate Climate Change Talking Points.

Never mind, RFK Jr clings to a fear of vaccines and GRFOF (General Ripper Fear of Fluoride):

Unless the current $660bn plan is drastically changed, vast areas of Australian industry and employment will be uneconomic, slashing our living standards, including social welfare.
The nation is now being to forced discuss more gas; to recognise the enormous power costs required to economically justify offshore wind farms in Victoria and NSW; the siting of renewable facilities in remote farm areas creating huge transmission costs and, of course, the addition of nuclear to our options.
To those options, I add the expansion of so called “regenerative farming”, which is a different approach to agriculture which can add a new dimension to reducing carbon emissions. There are few countries in the world with Australia’s potential to reduce emissions this way.
Better still, by working with Kennedy Jr., we may be able to repair some of the battered relationships we have with the Trump administration as a result of our foolish behaviour in the Middle East.
Kennedy’s policy to “Make America Healthy Again” by stripping additives out of processed food products boosted white female support for Trump and was crucial in his victory in key states. But Kennedy also wants to transform American farming. He describes his plan this way:
“America’s current agriculture policy destroys the health of American soil and water by tilting the playing field in favour of more chemicals, more herbicide, more insecticides, more concentrated monocrops and feed lots.
“The chemicals pollute our bodies the same way that they pollute the soil.
“I have seen some of what America’s most innovative regenerative farmers are doing today. They can literally green deserts and they rebuild depleted soils. Wells that have been dry for 30 years are now flowing. American agriculture will come roaring back.”

Then it was back into pastoral mode, though it began to sound eerily familiar:

Just outside of Hobart, the Coal River region surrounding Richmond is an award-winning farming and wine producing area with a similar latitude to the famous wine regions of France and Germany.

The answer, apparently, lies in the soil, though the pond always found rustic Arthur Fallowfield beyond the pond's ken:

Still, the pond can now rest easy because it's all been fixed, even if it's a hoax that's been fixed:

Australia will require different regenerative farming techniques to the US, but the common denominator is year-round to maximise the plant coverage of the land, which increases the amount of photosynthesis.
Regenerative farming also avoids bare soils that erode, avoids deep ploughing, stubble burning, overgrazing plus excessive use of chemicals and pesticides that destroy the carbon content of the soils
As in America, Australian regenerative farmers often face a hard time as they battle regulators, but they have had remarkable success.
In Australia, we can add an extra dimension to regenerative farming – growing plants with root systems that can store carbon. The most obvious plant is the saltbush which can also be harvested for protein.
At the start of the 21st century, the now retired head of the CSIRO energy division David Brockway mapped a new saltbush future for the nation. That vision is even more urgent now, given our current emission reduction schemes are uneconomic.
“Because we are releasing that sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere with dangerous climate consequences, the resumption of drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide is essential even if we reach zero emissions by 2050,” Brockway said.
Although other plant species need to be used, to implement the CSIRO strategy saltbush looks to be the cheapest and easiest way to extract carbon from the air and store it underground via the saltbush massive root systems.
In addition, the world is becoming short of protein and so saltbush plants can be harvested as an export crop or used for cattle and other farm animals in Australia.
Brockway elaborates this way: “By the substantial planting of deep-root species, deep into the soil where the carbon is stored, we can substantially draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over several decades.
“Deep-root species have a particular advantage in that significant amounts of carbon can be stored under conditions whereby the longevity of the carbon stored in the soil lasts for millennia, possibly for millions of years.
“For all intents and purposes – and certainly over the time frame required before renewables can become adopted universally – carbon stored in deep-root systems can be used to almost permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
“And it can be achieved in a very cost-effective manner.
“Australia has the unique opportunity to make a significant contribution to drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide using its vast areas of marginal land with deep-root species suited to its marginal and under-productive nature.”

Splendid stuff and the lizard Oz graphics department provided a snap to match, Farming can reduce emissions profitably, complete with heroic farmer gazing at a tamed sun:

Then it was on with the bliss and problem solved:

The Australian government-funded Agri Futures group says that saltbush can be grown in more than 60 per cent of the Australian mainland, covering most of Western Australia, Northern Territory, South Australia and in parts of NSW and Victoria.
Saltbush can be grown in arid, low rainfall areas, although its salt content means that it must be combined with other plants when harvested as a source of protein.
The biggest single protein market is China, which has some 400 million pigs and imports soya beans as a source of protein.
Massive saltbush planting and carbon absorption will enable an orderly rundown of carbon-based fuels, while the carbon storage will create carbon credits with a high global market value.
The potential rewards for Australia over the next decade or two are massive, but we need to do more carbon verification work to take any controversy out of the storage process.
And finally, a suggestion for Qantas and/or Virgin/Qatar. One of Australia’s great long term challenges is that the emissions involved in the long aviation journeys will discourage many affluent tourists from coming to Australia.

Qantas and Virgin can support large areas of regenerative farming and saltbush planting, which can neutralise emissions either at a profit or very low cost. Qantas can call it Project Longreach.

What a huge relief, and the reptiles finished the QED with a suggestive snap, Qantas and Virgin could support large areas of regenerative farming and saltbush planting, Picture: Justin Lloyd:

Emissions solved, hoax ended, who could want for more? 

He's not just a bromancer substitute you know, he's equally adept as a world class climate scientist ready and willing to explain how renewables are a blind alley, and the answer lies in the soil. 

Why we might not even need to nuke the country to save the planet, and the pond looks forward to the mutton Dutton recanting and embracing the Mein Gott vision.

As a bonus, the pond would like to draw attention to Anne Applebaum's story in The Atlantic, The Syrian Regime Collapsed Gradually—And Then Suddenly Assad’s fall offers the possibility of change.

The pond had thought of running a portion to accompany Mein Gott this morning, but it got too unwieldy, though the comparison of Assad to his good buddy Vlad the sociopath was more interesting than anything Mein Gott had to say ...

Inter alia:

..Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and, until now, Syria all belong to an informal network of autocracies. Russian troops and mercenaries have spent the past decade fighting in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa. Russian political and information operations actively seek to undermine, dominate, or overthrow democratic governments in Moldova, Georgia, and most recently Romania. Starting in 2015, Russian troops propped up Assad in partnership with Iran and Iran’s proxy Hezbollah. In Ukraine, Russia’s war is made possible by drones from Iran, soldiers and ammunition from North Korea, and covert help from China. Russia, Iran, Cuba, and China collaborate to keep in power a regime in Venezuela that has catastrophically failed its people too.
Many of these are military conflicts, but Russian President Vladimir Putin also believes that he is fighting a war of ideas, and he has persuaded others to follow him. In both Syria and occupied Ukraine, Russia has deliberately backed or created regimes that have not merely sought to repress opponents but have also gone out of their way to demonstrate flagrant disregard for human rights and the rule of law, ideas that Putin claims belong to the past. When Putin talks about a new world order or a “multipolar world,” as he did again last month, this is what he means: He wants to build a world in which his cruelty cannot be limited, in which he and his fellow dictators enjoy impunity, and in which no universal values exist, not even as aspirations.
The results are stark. Since 2011, the Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented more than 112,000 disappearances—men, women, and children arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned with no formal or legal justification. The regime has tortured tens of thousands of people in brutal prisons, keeping them in the dark, forbidding them any contact with the outside world. Infamously, Assad used poison gas against his own people and then lied about it. Joint Russian and Syrian-government air strikes deliberately targeted hospitals and practiced “double tap” strikes, bombing a civilian target and then hitting the same location soon afterward to kill rescue workers.
The Russian war against Ukraine has been equally cruel and equally lawless, in many instances copying tactics used in Syria. In occupied Ukraine, thousands of mayors, local leaders, teachers, and cultural figures have also disappeared into invisible custody. The former mayor of Kherson, abducted in June 2022, is reportedly being held in an illegal prison in Crimea; the mayor of Dniprorudne recently died in custody. In the rest of Ukraine, Russia deliberately targets hospitals and other civilian infrastructure, just as Russian and Syrian government planes did in Syria. Double-tap strikes are common in Ukraine too.
This kind of cold, deliberate, well-planned cruelty has a logic to it: Brutality is meant to inspire hopelessness. Ludicrous lies and cynical propaganda campaigns are meant to create apathy and nihilism. Random arrests have driven millions of Syrians, Ukrainians, and Venezuelans abroad, creating large, destabilizing waves of refugees and leaving those who remain in despair. The despair, again, is part of the plan. These regimes want to rob people of any ability to plan for a different future, to convince people that their dictatorships are eternal. “Our leader forever” was the Assad dynasty’s slogan.
But all such “eternal” regimes have one fatal flaw: Soldiers and police officers are members of the public too. They have relatives who suffer, cousins and friends who experience political repression and the effects of economic collapse. They, too, have doubts, and they, too, can become insecure. In Syria, we have just seen the result.

Well yes, and another story that didn't make the pond's morning cut was Zoe Williams' piece in The Graudian, They ‘didn’t look the type’: how the media was fooled by Bashar and Asma al-Assad

In it Williams revived fond memories of Vogue and Vlad the sociopath on horseback ...

...When the Syrian spring erupted in 2011, Vogue magazine ran a profile of Asma al-Assad titled A Rose in the Desert. Her husband had already killed more than 5,000 civilians, including hundreds of children, when Asma was described as “the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies”. The journalist, Joan Juliet Buck, went on to note that “her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment”.
It caused uproar at the time. Vogue defended it initially, but later erased it from its archive, and for a long time the only online record of the piece was on a now defunct Assad fan site. Buck disavowed it, saying she had filed the words in January; Assad’s crackdowns, which led to global calls for his resignation, didn’t start until February. The defence was a little weak, given that Assad had been ruling Syria as a totalitarian police state since he took office in 2000, but the uproar wasn’t really about the journalist herself – who later called Asma al-Assad “the first lady of hell” – it was more a collective realisation that the carefree long 90s were over. The world had got serious, and whatever the new job of geopolitical storytelling was, postmodernism wasn’t up to it. You could no longer look at a repressive leader’s wife and note how elegantly she accessorised: “no watch, no jewellery apart from Chanel agates around her neck, not even a wedding ring, but fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green”.
Or at least, that’s what it felt like that scandal was about at first. In retrospect, the Asma al-Assad profile wasn’t just closing one chapter of history; it was also opening another. The Assad family, it later emerged, had paid an American PR firm, Brown Lloyd James, $5,000 a month to broker that article. Even if it would be another two years before Assad used chemical weapons against his own people – that was 2013, prompting yet more international outrage, to similar lack of effect – he would already have been well aware that his rule did not constitute anything the wider world would call democratic or laudable. It was basically a provocation to the global liberal establishment, as mediated through its style bible: how far are you prepared to turn a blind eye, for the right kind of access? Of course there was never any suggestion that Vogue had been paid to run the piece; rather, that proximity to the mad wealth of the Assads, being allowed to press its nose against the palace windows, was initially enough to make a magazine overlook the human rights violations and concentrate on the glamour.
Vladimir Putin was, around the same time, trying to cast himself as an action hero, releasing photos of himself on horseback, bare-chested, on a Harley, with a tiger. Who needs to have a stick up their arse about kleptocracy when it looks like so much fun? If an autocrat doesn’t look or act like one, if he looks instead like a giraffe (as people said about Bashar al-Assad), or a joker, or a clown, or a reality TV showman, maybe it won’t be such a bad life under him after all.
This impunity seems so obvious now – despots were just taunting the international democratic order with how flaky and negotiable its values were. But at the time it was bewildering.

Speaking of clowns, jokers and reality TV showmen, this time the pond can end with an up to date Tom Tomorrow, available here:

Bring on Saturnalia, the quicker the better ...