In which only the Ughmann features, thereby allowing a few other distractions ...

 

As usual, an excellent Beast appeared onFriday, slouching towards the machinations of News Corp, ironically with former reptile Tory Shepherd one of a trio busy compiling Gas warfare: News Corp tabloids’ week of energy doom ends with an anointed saviour.

For those inclined to nostalgia, Tory could be found in the pond way back when, punching away, as here and here.

Now she's safe in the Graudian, like a bug in a rug, quoting Andrew Dodd, director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism at length (no doubt with the Lynch mob's help in advancing the cause of ratbag columnists, another exceptional University of Melbourne contribution to advanced journalism):

...Dodd pointed out that News Corp has accused the ABC of “blatant energy activism” and criticised the funding of the Environmental Defenders Office.
“But they’re nothing like as transparent when it comes to revealing the amount of money they’re receiving for this campaign,” he said.
“That constitutes hypocrisy.”
He said it also showed little regard for their audiences. “They’re hoodwinking them,” he said.
“It’s deceptive in so many ways. It is disgraceful and it damages or diminishes journalism. It is an egregious case of poor journalism, an egregious case of campaigning dressed up as journalism.
“The scale is breathtaking, the fact they’re giving over the front pages of their most-read newspapers across the nation for as much as a week indicates the breadth and depth [of it].”
Dodd’s colleague at the centre, senior lecturer Denis Muller, described it as “propaganda”.
The campaign neglected to highlight how Australia’s export of gas affects its pricing, he said, adding that it was a “tactic”.
“It may have an effect on some people, but more to the point it helps to spook the politicians … they realise that News Corp are continuing down this climate denial path and that it causes hesitancy among those politicians, and among climate scientists, many of whom have been on the receiving end of campaigns by News Corporation,” he said.

Why quote it at length, when every pond reader should have already taken to heart the pond's message that the weekly Beast is an essential read for herpetology students?

Well much the same egregious breathtaking behaviour was on display this morning in the lizard Oz, with a criminal act transformed into a political campaign, and propaganda for Zionism of the worst kind.

There was Josh front and centre, and Cameron Stewart talking of a slippery slope, when really the slippery slope was the reptiles doing their best to use a criminal act to maintain their propaganda machine.

It was the same over on the far right, with simplistic Simon - here no conflict of interest - briefly top of the reptile world ma, while down below Dave Sharma piled on ...

Keen eyes will have noted that the dog botherer was among the howling pack of reptiles, blathering on about moral clarity in a way only a dog fucking scumbag might manage.

The pond decided it wasn't going to have any of it, it wasn't going to encourage this wolf pack (to mix submarine metaphors) and instead would settle for the immortal Rowe du jour, titled Two States:

Australia joined 156 other nations in proposing that Israel bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestiniann Territory as rapidly as possible, and yet for the reptiles, enthusiastically supporting the mutton Dutton, it was a chance to score cheap political points.

Instead of spending time with hysterical reptiles, the pond thought it worth quoting a little of Rachel Coghlan in Crikey, ‘This is the toughest time since the genocide began’: Famine continues to spread across Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza have been subjected to decades of displacement, occupation and blockade. But this hunger is unprecedented (paywall):

It was a reminder of what's happening and what's at stake -mass starvation, mass displacement, mass ethnic cleansing:

As the Israeli onslaught on Gaza clocked past 423 days this week, my friend Mahmoud*, a Gazan language professor, checked in with me via WhatsApp: “I am ok, just been busy with a few things, mainly trying to survive… Things are edging towards hunger point given that there is no flour to buy.” 
Famine is now spreading fast across the entire Gaza Strip, with more than 1 million people going without food parcels since July or earlier due to Israeli blocking of humanitarian assistance. There has also been direct targeting of those who try to ease the hunger.
Over the weekend, chef Mahmoud Almadhoun, co-founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen — an initiative born in this current crisis to provide hot meals, clean drinking water, comfort and solidarity — was assassinated by an Israeli drone as he served those starving in northern Gaza. For the second time this year, humanitarian workers with the food aid charity World Central Kitchen were killed in their car in Khan Younis by an Israeli airstrike. 
Mahmoud wrote on: “I bought a sack of flour of 25kg for $120 and now the price has reached $200. I had to buy it as my children started to complain they are hungry and can’t feel full most of the time. Flour is such an essential food ingredient… this is the toughest time since the genocide began.”
Palestinians in Gaza have been subjected to decades of displacement, occupation and blockade, violations to rights of peace, freedom and health, and omnipresent loss, grief and death. But this famine is unprecedented.

But the pond had to have at least one token reptile along for the ride and settled on the Ughmann, one of the world's top climate scientists, offering The German chancellor’s nightmare revisited, Since 2000, Germany has spent $1 trillion shutting fossil fuel and nuclear generation and replacing it with wind and solar energy harvesting. It is an unmitigated disaster.

Yep, it's another chance to bash renewables, with only a change of scenery, and with an opening illustration hinting at where the Ughman is heading:

As German chancellor in 2006, Angela Merkel welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin to the eastern German city of Dresden to discuss energy security. Behind a green facade, Germany hid a lifeline to Russian fossil fuel. Picture: AFP/Denis Sinyakov

In no particular order, in the Ughmann's account, the mango Mussolini emerges as a prescient presence, Vlad the impaler is a worry (though not to the MM), talk of climate ambitions is dangerous alarmism, and can only lead to pain, and so on and so endlessly forth:

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has released a new book called Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021.
It deserves a different title: Serfdom: The Cost of Caution.
It is an abiding mystery how a leader who got energy, the economy, defence, foreign affairs and migration so catastrophically wrong still enjoys any support at all.
Early in her tenure the German press dubbed Merkel the Climate Chancellor for championing the country’s Energiewende (energy transition). Since 2000 the nation has spent $1 trillion shutting fossil fuel and nuclear generation and replacing it with wind and solar energy harvesting.
It is an unmitigated disaster. German electricity costs have soared to be the highest in Europe and German carbon emissions per person are about twice that of nuclear-powered France.
A quarter of a century into Germany’s transition, 78 per cent of its primary energy still comes from coal (18 per cent), oil (34 per cent) and gas (26 per cent).
Behind a green facade, Germany hid a lifeline to Russian fossil fuel. In 2022 Berlin relied on Moscow for a third of its oil and more than half of its gas imports. This was a glaring, and colossal, strategic weakness.
When Russia invaded Ukraine the gas pipeline was cut and the green fraud collapsed.
Germany reopened brown-coal-fired generators, scoured the globe for fuel and moved at warp speed to get liquefied natural gas import terminals to save its grid from collapse.
All of this had been foreseen. Remember, this was Russia’s second strike on Ukraine. The first hit was on Crimea in 2014 and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned Merkel that Germany, and Europe, was strategically exposed by its energy dependence.
“Increasingly more expensive energy in Europe due to exorbitant climate and environmental ambitions may also mean greater dependence in Russian energy sources,” Tusk said. “Hence, I will talk (to Merkel) primarily about how Germany is able to correct some economic actions so that dependence on Russian gas doesn’t paralyse Europe when it needs … a decisive stance.”

Merkel ignored this and other warnings. No one was more strident in his opposition than once and future president Donald Trump. In 2018 he told the NATO summit in Brussels that Germany had become a captive to Moscow “because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia”.
Four months before the war was rebooted, Merkel signed off on a top-secret security assessment on a second gas pipeline from Russia, the Nord Stream 2, which concluded that “granting of certification (for the pipeline) does not jeopardise the security of gas supply in Germany and the European Union”.
Merkel believed the pipeline made Russia’s Vladimir Putin beholden to Germany. Turns out he knew her way better than she knew him. Here’s a thought to ponder: would Putin have invaded Ukraine if he did not believe Europe’s gas dependency was an achilles heel?
Patrick Wintour wrote in The Guardian that in the first two months of the Ukraine war Germany paid “€8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk”. Historian Timothy Snyder took to Twitter to note: “For 30 years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism. When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”
Merkel’s misjudgment of Putin explains her woeful commitment to defence. Here she wagered that the US would do the heavy lifting in NATO. Despite repeated calls for Germany to do more, defence spending stayed at a paltry 1.3 per cent of GDP. Now, on a book tour, Merkel has conceded she “should have reacted more quickly to Russia’s aggressiveness”.
Get energy policy wrong and the economy will soon follow. Germany is now de-industrialising.
Reuters reports an August poll of 3300 companies by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce showed 37 per cent were considering cutting production or moving abroad.
In energy-intensive industries 45 per cent were mulling slashing output or relocation.
“The trust of the German economy in energy policy is severely damaged,” chamber deputy chief executive Achim Dercks said.
Merkel’s misreading of another autocracy hammered another nail into her nation’s coffin lid.
In 2017 I asked a senior German official about Berlin’s view of Beijing’s Made in China 2025 plan: a blueprint for rapidly expanding China’s advanced manufacturing base. Was Berlin worried that Beijing was looking to displace it? I was assured that, like Putin, Xi Jinping’s ambitions were not a threat to Germany.
Recently, The Asia Times has been busy reporting on German companies relocating to China. It notes that, since 2021, Germany’s industrial production has fallen by more than 9 per cent. In energy-intensive industries the fall is double that, “pointing to significant problems in sectors heavily dependent on affordable energy”.
China is now eating Germany’s lunch. Analysis by the Institute for Economic Research finds “Germany’s lead over China in the European Union market is increasingly shrinking”.
The root cause of the nation’s woes is identified as “the challenges associated with the energy transition and fundamental problems regarding competitiveness”.
The Chinese market is now buying more of its own cars and flooding the world with cheap, high-quality models. Soon, Germany’s giant car industry will collapse. Its biggest private sector employer, Volkswagen, is threatening to close domestic plants for the first time in its 87-year history.

The pond has allowed the Ughmann an extended rant, but on the matter of Volkswagen, the pond must really interrupt. 

Why are Chinese car makers eating the lunch of assorted manufacturers in assorted territories? 

Well they did something that European car manufacturers failed to do ... get on the EV bandwagon.

You could almost hear the Ughmann sitting in the Volkswagen board room urging them on, with talk of how climate science was crap, renewables were a waste of space and as for the so-called "EV revolution", forgedit, no one will want EVs ...

And so after that epic earlier stumble, Dieselgate or Emissiongate if you will, came endless stories about how Volkswagen failed to adapt...

Or there's this story by Colin Walker, VW factory closures highlight consequences of going slow on EVs: comment:

Commenting on the news that Volkswagen is planning to close 3 factories in Germany, Colin Walker, Head of Transport at the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), said:
“This is a sad consequence of an industry that is dragging its heels in making the transition to building EVs, rather than embracing it.
“Here in the UK, 80% of the cars we build are exported, the majority of which go to markets that are phasing out the sale of petrol and diesel cars and shifting to electric. If our car industry doesn’t alter production to match these trends, it faces a very uncertain future.
“A recent report by CBI Economics has found that failing to support the UK’s car industry in making the switch to electrification could see the its economic output fall by 73%, or £34bn, with more than 400,000 jobs being lost. Conversely, get it right and invest in a speedier transition, and the industry’s contributions to the UK economy could increase by over £16bn, with more than 167,000 new jobs being created.
“Events in Germany have starkly brought these findings to life, and make it clear to anyone concerned about the future prosperity of the UK’s car industry that slowing down the transition to EVs will only serve to hasten its demise. Its future hinges on it making a rapid and successful transition to electrification and Government will need to support in that”.

Well yes, and it's luddites of the climate science denying, renewables bashing Ughmann kind that have helped keep German manufacturers down and out.

Meanwhile the reptiles were interrupting the Ughmann with a cross-promotional effort featuring the Ughmann talking to petulant Peta:

Sky News contributor Chris Uhlmann has called out Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen for “gaslighting” the Australian people. “Chris Bowen may take people for mugs but I don’t believe that they are,” Mr Uhlmann told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “If he keeps gaslighting people like this, he’s just digging an enormous hole for himself and the Labor Party come the next election.”

Always with the projection, because the one routinely indulging in gaslighting is the climate science denying, renewables bashing Ughmann ...

The Ughmann was also adept at kicking the white nationalist can a little further down the road, surprising the pond by pretending to be alarmed at the rise of the far right in Germany. 

Why on earth should he be alarmed at the rise of News Corp's kissing cousins around the world?

And what of Merkel’s decision to allow a million refugees to flood across Germany’s borders in 2015? In September Germany announced it was reinstating border checks, effectively hitting pause on Europe’s free-movement zone.
A YouGov poll shows 73 per cent of Germans favour increased border controls and 82 per cent are in favour of deporting those staying illegally.
The German government is now in crisis after the implosion of its “traffic light” coalition. The country will go to the polls next year and the governing party, the Social Democrats, now trails the far right Alternative for Germany in the polls.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has picked up the phone to Putin and one of the talking points was energy. In Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky can feel the ground shifting beneath his feet.
It would be hard to care about Germany’s self-inflicted troubles if Merkel had not worked so assiduously at exporting them. A disturbing number of Australian politicians still cite Germany as the template for their green dream.
And they have put us on the same highway to hell.
Our grid is growing weaker and electricity prices are rising. Ludicrously, energy-rich Australia is now building LNG import terminals, adding electricity to the massive strategic weakness we already have on liquid fuel supplies.
It’s hard to credit the wilful blindness of the mandarin class and hard to see how we don’t follow Germany to Hades.
But there is one iron law of politics: somewhere on the pathway to poverty the people will revolt.

Speaking of wilful blindness of the reptile mandarin class and a highway to hell to an impending Hades, how goes the planet?

Ah, an abundance of stories you'll never in reptile la la land, or in the Ughmann's screeds.

At the ABC: Fewer low-altitude clouds may explain 'missing' 0.2C of warming from Earth's hottest year: study

At New Scientist: We finally have an explanation for 2023’s record-breaking temperatures, A decline in low-lying cloud cover means Earth is absorbing more solar radiation, which could explain 0.2°C of missing heat scientists have been struggling to account for.

At the Graudian: How climate risks are driving up insurance premiums around the US – visualized, ‘Tight correlation’ between premium rises and counties deemed most at risk from climate crisis, experts say.

At the Grattan Institute: What the Annual Climate Change Statement means for Australia (a podcast but with a transcript).

Kat Clay had some great news for Penrith: ...You know, I did grow up in Western Sydney and I still remember recent years where, you know, Penrith was the hottest place on earth. It wasn’t the Sahara Desert. It wasn’t all the places you think are going to be the hottest place on earth. It was Penrith. And having grown up in that kind of heat bowl and seeing that temperature increase over time is just, you know, it has really ramped home. How much climate change is happening. 

And so on and on. 

What else? Well by limiting itself to just one reptile, the pond could wander a little further afield and thereby discover that Marina Hyde was in top form, marinating Justin Welby in her inimitable way in  Farewell, then, Justin Welby. Good to see that you have already forgiven yourself

The pond won't quote at length because the pond expects even stray and random pond readers will always expose themselves to the chance of a decent Hydeing, as she excoriated Welby up hill and down dale:

...During the years he knew about many British victims of Smyth, Welby found time to address a vast range of topics. The legitimacy of fear in the Brexit debate, Bake Off, the gig economy, usury, reality TV, credit unions, the iniquities of the global trade system, airstrikes against Islamic State, the broken economic model … All of these things – and so many more – over which Welby had no operational control were given a hose-down of his reflections, while Smyth moved on to abusing at least 85 more boys (at current estimate) in African nations. This was a horror that Welby could have actually done something direct to prevent. Smyth eventually died in South Africa in 2018 as a free man, despite finally being under investigation by Hampshire police. For all his evil suggestions to boys that his torturous beatings were a way of avoiding brimstone, I assume Smyth never even actually believed there was a hell, or he wouldn’t have spent a lifetime booking his spot in it.
Ultimately, the live story since Welby’s resignation should be the speed with which this entire archbishop-felling affair is already being swept under the church’s vast carpet, despite victims working desperately to stop that. Yet why should it be up to victims to have to keep pushing in order to keep the matter prominent? Why should it be up to people who have already been through the most hideous things to have to somehow find the strength to push for a huge, powerful, and evidently self-interested institution to make serious changes?
Before he tendered his resignation, allies of Welby defended him with the jaw-dropping argument that other senior church figures knew far more about Smyth’s abuse than Welby and for a lot longer. In which case: who are they? What are their names? What is being done to hold them to account? Every one of those supposedly godly figures should be facing consequences, but won’t be, because the Church of England is somehow still in charge of its own safeguarding arrangements.
Institutional cover-up of abuse so reliably follows the same patterns that I have come to think that all who fail to inform the proper authorities once abuse has been reported to them should be liable to criminal charges of aiding and abetting. Perhaps that would crystallise their minds as to the right thing to do. Until then, the entire way in which this business has played out and is still playing out confirms not just that “justice cannot be replaced by religious observance or pious comment” – but that “the justice of the powerful is not justice at all”. A supposedly wise man once made those declarations.  (YouTube link). I shan’t insult you by saying who.

Meanwhile, the karnival of exceptionally komedic nominee klowns was still creating much excitement.

The Bulwark was on a Kash Patel jag, what with Paul Rosenzweig's Kash Patel Is Getting in the Way of His Own Retribution , and Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger combining to produce Kash Patel’s Podcast Problem, Prior to being a nominee to run the FBI, Patel appeared on a white nationalist’s program—multiple times.

It was all jolly good fun - there's nothing like incompetent, inept, stumbling, loonish far right fanaticism on parade to set the pond's juices running - and provide great fodder for cartoonists.

The quick hits at the end of the Kristol/Egger piece were even better fun:

THAT’S NOT OUR JOB: Sen. Tommy Tuberville, one of Donald Trump’s staunchest Senate allies, isn’t pleased with how some of his colleagues seem inclined to evaluate Trump’s cabinet picks on the merits rather than rubber-stamping them through. “Who are we to say that we’re a better vetter and picker of people than Donald Trump?” he said in a brief interview yesterday with CNN. Tuberville went on:
"Donald Trump did all the vetting they needed to do on Pete Hegseth. And I just can’t believe—we even have people on our side saying, ‘Well, I’ve gotta look at this, gotta look at that.’ What they’re doing is throwing rocks at Donald Trump. They’re not throwing ‘em at Pete Hegseth. They’re throwing ‘em at Donald Trump, because they’re saying, well, we don’t believe you did the right vetting and we don’t believe he can do the job. Wait a minute, that’s not our job to do that. That’s the Democrats’."
SURE, WHY NOT? You may have seen headlines in recent days over a batch of raw milk being recalled in California after testing positive for bird flu. But Mark McAfee, the CEO of the recalled brand, is suggesting the whole thing is political, according to Politico: “What they don’t want is for raw milk to thrive, and that’s a political decision they made years ago,” he said of the Food and Drug Administration. “It’s a new angle to try and discourage us.”
Politico notes change may be on the horizon. McAfee “says he was asked by [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s] running mate Nicole Shanahan to apply for a role at the Food and Drug Administration as a ‘raw milk adviser.’”
Wake us up, please.

Finally the pond was beguiled by the work of Steven Monacelli and Tristan Lee in the Texas Observer, Revealed: the Operators Behind Four Major Neo-Nazi X Accounts, Anonymity has long been a tactic used by extremists to spread their ideology while avoiding social consequences, from Klansmen hoods to online pseudonyms.

It was The Bulwark that provided the link to the yarn, which was outside the paywall when the pond visited, and was a reminder of the sort of thing Uncle Leon is now allowing:

...Anonymity has long been a tactic used by extremists to spread their ideology while avoiding consequences, from Klansmen hoods to online pseudonyms. With such ideas spreading rapidly on X, the Texas Observer has identified the operators of four anonymous accounts that regularly share racist, antisemitic, and neo-Nazi content on the platform. Three of the operators appear to live or have claimed to own property in Texas, where X moderation operations are based and Musk resides.
Through reviewing posts on X, web archives, leak databases, and other social media profiles, the Observer identified the following individuals as the anonymous operators of neo-Nazi X accounts, which had a collective 500,000 followers at their peak: Cyan Cruz, a 40-year-old marketing professional who appears to have lived in Austin and Amarillo and operates the X account TheOfficial1984; Michael Gramer, a 42-year-old retired mechanical engineer who has lived in New Hampshire, operates the X account 9mm_SMG, and has claimed to have a house in Galveston and to be spending time in Dallas; Robert “Bobby” Thorne, a 35-year-old vice president at JP Morgan Chase in Plano, who operates the account Noble1945 and previously operated the account Noble_x_x_; and John Anthony Provenzano, a 30-year-old who appears to live in Virginia, operates the account utism_ (formerly known as JohnnyBullzeye), and, according to a tip and a records request response from the U.S. Navy, works at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Maryland—where the Navy manufactures explosive ordnance.
These individuals are part of a broader ecosystem of far-right accounts that have rapidly expanded their reach in recent months. They are among the most popular white nationalist and neo-Nazi accounts on X whose operators have not yet been publicly identified. (While this article was in production, the Anti-Defamation League also identified Cruz as the operator of TheOfficial1984.) Their rise to prominence tracks with a dramatic decrease in moderation of hateful content on the platform, which dropped from 1 million moderated accounts in 2021 to only 2,361 accounts in the most recent 2024 X transparency report. Posts from these individuals have received tens of millions of views over the last year and a half. The accounts have also attracted the attention of major public figures. Two of the accounts have received replies from the X account of Elon Musk, who has said he writes all of his own X posts and who, as reported by Mother Jones, has amplified users who promote pseudoscientific arguments that those of European descent are biologically superior. Three of the accounts are followed by a sitting congressman, and many other right-wing media figures and outlets follow at least one of the four accounts.

And so on and on, and what a relief it was to restrict the pond's reptile diet to just one this day. 

Admittedly the Ughmann is always hard to digest and will sit in the belly for hours, but imagine if the pond had also attempted to swallow all that reptile talking up of antisemitism without any attention to the current ethnic displacement, mass starvation and genocide ...

And so to contemplate a bright future for the world, at least if the tangerine tyrant's talk of tariffs comes to pass ...

Roll on Saturnalia ...