In which the pond manages to avoid petulant Peta thanks to splendid efforts by the Riddster, the Lynch mob and Mein Gott

 

Each Thursday the pond has an anxiety attack - will this be the Thursday that the pond has to embrace petulant Peta to keep its loon quotient at a healthy level?

The pond could cheat of course. 

The United States currently is awash with loonery - at the moment attention has shifted from Pete to Tulsi, with the Beast offering MAGA Fears Hegseth Isn’t Trump’s Biggest Confirmation Headache (paywall):

While Gabbard is well liked in Trump’s orbit, she must still win over a number of longtime Republican defense hawks and supporters of Ukraine, a task complicated by her past remarks.
The former congresswoman’s sympathetic comments toward Moscow have been regurgitated and promoted by Russian state media, an entity which also hailed Gabbard as a “superwoman” and praised Trump’s selection of her for the cabinet position.
She has also secretly met with Syrian President Bashar Assad, a staunch Putin ally, whom she claimed was not an enemy of the U.S., breaking with the nation’s approach to Middle East diplomacy.
Gabbard, however, later called Assad a “brutal dictator.”
Regardless of her backtracking, fellow Republican Nikki Haley cited Gabbard’s diplomatic entanglements when snubbing her nomination for DNI, claiming the role is “not a place for a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer.”

And The Hill had the same sort of take, Gabbard seen as tough lift for Trump in Senate GOP (outside paywall):

Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) is emerging as a tough confirmation lift for President-elect Trump, even as other nominees such as Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for the Pentagon, run into serious hurdles.
Gabbard, Trump’s pick to become director of national intelligence, has received less attention in recent days compared to Hegseth — who has seen multiple bombshell reports pop up about his treatment of women — or Kash Patel, the president-elect’s controversial pick to lead the FBI.
But a number of aides and senators view her path as the most difficult of those three.
“I think Gabbard, out of the three, still has the toughest path,” one Senate GOP aide told The Hill. “[She] is the most at risk.”
A number of GOP senators are skeptical about her foreign policy dealings and her trustworthiness in potentially heading the nation’s intelligence apparatus.
Although Gabbard is a favorite of Trump World, the Senate Republican Conference remains a different type of playing field, as it still contains a number of defense hawks and supporters of Ukraine in their ongoing war with Russia.
Some members of that crowd remain skeptical of Gabbard especially due to her past remarks about the Ukraine war that were sympathetic to Moscow and echoed by Russian state media — which has also praised her selection.
She also has views on the Middle East that break with the political establishment of both parties. She has said that Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom she controversially visited in 2017, is not an enemy of the U.S., though she later called him a “brutal dictator.”
“Behind closed doors, people think she might be compromised. Like it’s not hyperbole,” the aide continued. “There are members of our conference who think she’s a [Russian] asset.”

But that would be shameless cheating. 

The karnival of komical klowns is going to offer at least four years of komedy kapers of the klan kind. What can the reptiles offer by way of a match? 

The pond breathed a sigh of relief. Another Thursday safe from petulant Peta:

Forget the attempt to bring neglected Noel back into the fold; forget the hysteria about greenie votes, look over at the extreme far right to see the goodies on offer ...

Why right below petulant Peta, admittedly top of the krazy kolumnists this day, came a kornucopia of fun.

Who knew that the Riddster, as well as being the world's top climate scientist and reef diviner, was an expert on health, but here we are ... Trump’s revolution is coming for the health technocrats, Trump, Ramaswamy, Kennedy and others hopefully will begin to Make American Science Even Greater. We need to do the same in Australia.

Look, it's allegedly only a three minute read, but it begins on the right note with a passing reference to the joys of drilling, baby, drilling, and with a parade of loons, namely said Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy, in an exquisite photo montage that showed the lizard Oz graphics department in top form:

Take it away Riddster, sock it to the pond just like the lizard Oz graphics department. Give the pond some of that dead bear hugging, head of whale loving, anti-vax science that can bring measles and polio to the world:

Of all the creatures in the US bureaucratic swamp, environmental and medical science organisations have the most to fear from the return of Donald Trump. The science behind claims of catastrophic climate change, and many environmental and medical issues, finally will be subject to scrutiny.
Trump clearly is not a believer in catastrophic climate change, otherwise his favourite phrase would not be “Drill, baby, drill”.
Like most Americans and his right-hand man, Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump can see climate change is being used as a front in the culture wars.
In a Rasmussen poll, 60 per cent of Americans agreed with Ramaswamy’s comment that climate change had become a reli­gion that “actually has nothing to do with the climate” and was really about power and control. This is a huge and understandable vote of no confidence in the cataclysmic assertions of climate science.

As usual, the pond had to pause for a reptile cross-promotion:

Sky News contributor Kosha Gada claims President-elect Donald Trump’s presidency will be an “interesting ride” with his cabinet picks. “He has finished making all of his picks, President Trump, and that is record speed,” Ms Gada said. “This is shaping up to be a very different cabinet, lots of reformers and young people.”

"A very different cabinet."

What an admirable understatement, but back to the Riddster, done with climate science, now feeling his medical oats:

Even worse, a survey published by the American Medical Association found trust in physicians and hospitals collapsed from 71 per cent to 40 per cent across the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. And who can blame people for this collapse of trust, given the genuine conspiracies by government science authorities?
In his first term Trump was unsuccessful in bringing any useful scrutiny to the more extreme climate and environmental science issues. Scott Pruitt, Trump’s first head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was a fan of employing so-called red teams to challenge the science behind many environmental regulations.
However, Trump was vigorously opposed by Washington insiders and from within his own Republican Party, so his scepticism about the veracity of science institutions came to nothing.
But times have changed and he now owns the Republican Party and all levels of federal government. Any doubts that Trump means to do something about the failing science institutions should be dispelled by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr to run the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy has maintained for years that the American medical sciences are plagued by corruption, stemming from the enormous amounts of money received from the drug industry. Do they have too much influence on government regulators? Kennedy says he wants to return the agencies “to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science”. And he has stated: “I’m not anti-vaccine. I just want good science.”

Ah, nah, he'scertainly not anti-vaccine.

What does RFK Jr say about vaccine safety?
Kennedy said in his NPR interview that vaccines were “not going to be taken away from anybody”.
He says he wants to improve the science on vaccine safety which he believes has “huge deficits” and that he wants good information so people “can make informed choices“.
But his critique of the vaccine safety regime has been roundly dismissed by experts.
While Kennedy has denied on several occasions that he is anti-vaccination and said he and his children are vaccinated, he has repeatedly stated widely debunked claims about vaccine harm.
One of his main false claims - repeated in a 2023 interview with Fox News, was that “autism comes from vaccines”.
This theory was popularised by discredited UK doctor Andrew Wakefield.
But Wakefield's 1998 study was later retracted by the Lancet medical journal. Multiple studies since, across many countries, have concluded there is no link between vaccines and autism.
Dr David Elliman, a consultant in community child health at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, said RFK Jr has perpetuated myths around vaccination with “an utter disregard for the evidence”.
“If he is appointed and continues in the same mode, I fear not just for the vaccination programme in the US, but similar programmes around the world, and for healthcare in general," says Dr Elliman.
"Vaccination has probably saved more lives and is better researched than most, if not all, aspects of healthcare. RFK Jr could set this back and be responsible for the death and disability of myriads of people, particularly children.” (BBC)

Never mind fluoride or Covid claims in the same piece, just remember Samoa and measles. 'We learned the hard way': Samoa remembers a deadly measles outbreak and a visit from RFK Jr:

Kennedy and his wife, Cheryl Hines, were special guests at Samoa’s 57th independence celebrations in June 2019, as part of a trip that came about after the anti-vaccination non-profit group Kennedy founded, Children’s Health Defense, connected with vocal Samoan vaccine critic and traditional healer Edwin Tamasese.
Tamasese was arrested during the measles epidemic for incitement against a government vaccination order. The charges against Tamasese were later dropped, with a judge citing insufficient evidence.
Kennedy, who would later hail Tamasese as a “hero” in a blog post and describe the epidemic as “mild”, also met with the Australian Samoan anti-vaccine influencer Taylor Winterstein. She posted a photo of the pair to her social media using anti-vax hashtags, saying his visit was “profoundly monumental” for the movement.
Months after his visit, Kennedy wrote a letter to then-Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi urging him to consider if children’s deaths were caused by a “defective” vaccine or a “mutant strain” of measles caused by it. Neither is plausible....
...“When you get people who are wealthy and influential going into a fragile setting, it’s like the top of the food chain visiting and meeting up with those who act as the megaphone. The impact was devastating.” The resurgence of disease when vaccine rates go down is predictable, she said.
Kennedy has spread false claims that the MMR vaccines cause autism. According to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, he is one of the world’s top disinformation super-spreaders. Public health officials in Samoa said anti-vaccination activists had been empowered by Kennedy, which had affected vaccine uptake.
“The Samoan incident showed us how disinformation can kill,” said American paediatrician Dr Paul Offit, who has followed Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism since 2005. “He sowed further distrust, he jumped all over it – he met with anti-vaxxers in Samoa to promote the notion that ‘it’s not measles, it’s the vaccine’, and immunisation rates dropped.”

And so on and on, but the reptiles sought to distract the pond with a snap of Jay Bhattacharya, the herd immunity man:

“Despite his mild manners, Bhattacharya is a self-interested extremist who gives cover to anti-vaxxers & promotes policies that will kill people. He will set American health, innovation, & science back for a generation. He’s not here to reform NIH. He’s here to destroy it,” virologist Angela Rasmussen wrote on X.

Could it get any better? Well we haven't got to Kemi yet ...

But Kennedy is just the beginning of the insurrection in the health sciences. Trump has nominated Marty Makary to head the Food and Drug Administration; Makary crossed swords with the medical establishment over Covid lockdown policies.
And Trump’s nomination for US surgeon general, Janette Nesheiwat, has strongly criticised the American Academy of Pediatrics for using puberty blockers to treat children with gender dysphoria.
But most remarkable is the nomination of Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health. He was co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which pointed out the damage of Covid lockdowns. The medical science establishment tried to crucify him, now he will be its boss.
Of course, most areas of science are rock solid and nobody doubts it. There is no doubt that Newton’s laws of motion work. Industrial science is audited by the red team called cold hard reality. But in many areas where success and failure are not obvious, better systems are needed to stop groupthink, ideology or self-interest influencing the scientific wisdom. Top among these systems is ensuring there is guaranteed debate, checking and auditing, which is largely what Kennedy is advocating.
In this regard, scientists are 180 years behind accountants and 300 years behind lawyers and politicians. Auditors are accountancy red teams. Defence lawyers are legal red teams, as is British Opposition Leader Kemi Badenoch. All these innovations are examples of the wonderful development of the institutions of Western civilisation, especially the British sub-branch. They happened because there was an obvious systemic deficiency that needed correction.

Ah, Kemi Badenoch:

The Riddster's concluding gobbet was just as rousing, all you might expect from an IPA - or should that be a Gina? - man:

Compulsory auditing of public companies started, at least theoretically, in 1844 in Britain. Arguably, it took a half-century to become effective. Similarly, defence lawyers were first allowed in criminal trials in the 1730s because it could be seen that there was a major missing part of the legal system. The accused were not good at defending themselves. Australia did not formally recognise, or even pay, the federal opposition leader until 1920. It can thus be seen that formalising official red teams has been a long process in society.
It is now science’s turn. In Australia, we need red teams to scrutinise the science behind the Great Barrier Reef and how it ended up with record amounts of coral after supposedly being almost destroyed a dozen times in the past six decades. Add to that bushfire and forest management, the Australian Covid response, the closure of our fisheries, the transgender cult, and climate and energy policy. Then throw in whether our education and social science research institutions have done more harm than good to society. Is there any chance these have been affected by groupthink, ideology or pure self-interest?
Trump, Ramaswamy, Kennedy and others hopefully will begin to Make American Science Even Greater. We need to do the same in Australia.
Peter Ridd is an adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Groupthink? Why is it always projection, there being no greater current example of groupthink than the Riddster's attempt to join the kosmic karnival of klowns kurrently doing the rounds.

But wait, that was just the beginning, because waiting in the wings was the Lynch mob, ready to riot in their usual way and bring fresh esteem and pride to the University of Melbourne, with Why ‘Big Abortion’ leads inevitably to ‘Big Euthanasia’, Parties of the left will seek to clothe reproductive rights and assisted dying in the same moral superiority. All the time we will be asked to celebrate the primacy of choice.

Actually it's always seemed simple to the pond. 

A woman should have control of her body, and should be able to make her own decisions as to what happens to it, without some meddlesome male prof getting in the way. 

Naturally the reptiles decided to help the Prof by starting with a snap of dangerous protestors, Protestors demonstrate at the March for Reproductive Rights in Los Angeles, California.

That set the Prof right off, and those who think they know how the Lynch mob can stage a riot and bung on a do might still be impressed by this outing:

Heinrich Heine’s ominous line, “Those who burn books will in the end burn people,” is one of the most quoted in modern history. It appears in his 1821 play, Almansor.
While it has become a leitmotiv of Holocaust remembrance – the sentence is engraved at Berlin’s Opernplatz commemorating the Nazi book burning of 1933 – Heine was actually describing the burning of Korans by Christians in late 15th-century Granada.
There is a certain irony in the contemporary Islamist zeal to burn books that offend the Prophet. Heine, a German Jew, was warning all of us that absolutist positions have murderous consequences.
The British House of Commons has missed the irony. In 1967, its MPs gave us abortion on demand; last week, it did the same with euthanasia. The move from withdrawing the right to life from the youngest to the oldest was not linear. But, as in Australia, it was perhaps inevitable.
Pressuring your old granny to shuffle off this mortal coil now has the veneer of choice. It is a chosen “death with dignity” that drives the voluntary assisted dying camp. There is dignity in abortion, too, we are often told. But dignity invites exploitation, and choices are subject to pressure. Abortion may have been safe (save for its target) and legal. It has not become rare. What will stop euthanasia being subject to the same forces?

Is there a fate the pond might wish on the pontificating prof as he evokes the Holocaust to make his alarmist point? Perhaps trapped in a nursing home with a terminal illness floating in and out of consciousness, suffused with incredible pain, only partially relieved by being dosed to the gills.

It's not for everyone, but there are plenty of stories out there about people in dire situations. As always the decisions are deeply personal and painful (YouTube), and not helped at all by reptile ideologues:

News Corp columnist Louise Roberts says proposals for teenagers under the age of 18 to be eligible for assisted dying are “extremely dangerous” and “insane”. The ACT Human Rights Commission has called for teenagers to be allowed to access voluntary assisted dying. They have argued that capping the scheme at the age of 18 infringes on young people’s right to receive healthcare “without discrimination”. “It’s extremely dangerous territory,” Ms Roberts told Sky News Senior Reporter Caroline Marcus. “I think to then sort of remove the protection of people under the age of 18 who, of course, may be terminally ill and in palliative care … is insane.”

The Lynch mob shows all the empathy and charm of a wet sock when it comes to people in difficult circumstances. It takes some fair cheek to produce the notion of "Big Abortion", but the Lynch mob is full of that sort of capacity for crap:

Big Abortion will find its companion in Big Euthanasia. Scientists will devise more efficient (and thus “more dignified”) death pods. Medical insurers will offer discounts to check out early. Parties of the left will seek to clothe reproductive rights and assisted dying in the same moral superiority. All the time we will be asked to celebrate the primacy of choice.
The US offers some lessons here. Unlike Britain, Europe and nearly all of Australia, Americans have not embraced VAD; it is legal in only 10 states. But at abortion they are world leaders. Since the US Supreme Court removed most protections of unborn children (in Roe v Wade, 1973), more than 60 million have been aborted – an average of more than a million a year. There were more abortions last year, the year after Roe was repealed, than in the year before it. Blue states such as New York and California have the most liberal abortion regimes in the world.
Democrats celebrated the procedure at their convention in Chicago this year. It was the one issue on which Kamala Harris spoke with fluency and conviction (if not electoral gain).
Two in every five abortions in the US are of a child of colour. African-American women comprise less than 8 per cent of the US population but in 2021 accounted for 42 per cent of all terminations.
The Democratic Party has been complicit in reducing its own voter base; non-Hispanic black women are its most reliable constituency and the demographic most depleted by abortion. If there is such a thing as structural racism and white supremacy, abortion might be their greatest exemplar.

Really? Might it not be that black women face discrimination and impossibly difficult choices? Who'd give a flying fuck about voter choices when contemplating a ten year old that's become pregnant as the result of an incestuous rape? Or for that matter the chance of a woman being made to carry a dead or deeply malformed foetus and made to die because doctors were afraid of going to prison?

ProPublica had that story here, while over at Ms. you could find A Running List of the Preventable Deaths Caused by Abortion Bans.

Meanwhile, the reptiles insisted on conflating the matters, with a snap of Campaigner and actress Liz Carr of the "Not Dead Yet" campaign, which opposed Britain’s Assisted Dying Bill, joins a protest outside the Houses of Parliament.

By this time the pond was getting jack of the prof and beginning to wonder if time spent with petulant Peta might be so bad up against this sort of ratbag rhetoric ...

Economic disadvantage (say liberals) and family breakdown (say conservatives) are cited as the causes of this disparity. Ideology aside, it is hard to ignore the ubiquity of a reproductive right that its original framers claimed would be used hardly at all.
Sound familiar? Euthanasia will be safe, legal and rare. Most British MPs pushed this line last week. We heard similar from our legislators when assisted dying was legalised in every Australian state between 2017 and last year. Only the territories have held out; the ACT will offer the procedure from next year. Access to assisted suicide, they all said, would absolutely not become a tool of population control or of political economy: “We would never put National Health Service/Medicare budgets before the right to life.” But the expansion of legal abortion since the early 1970s suggests otherwise.
An entire industry inevitably will develop around the right to die, as it has the right to abort. Euthanasia, like abortion, will be offered for more reasons rather than fewer. Bone cancer (one of the worst ways to die) is now grounds for the state to assist in your suicide. Will severe depression or gender dysphoria eventually trigger this assistance too? History suggests they will. My best friend of 50 years has clubfoot. Aborting him for this would have appalled some pro-choice activists in 1967. But this is now a routine reason to terminate a pregnancy. Why should we suppose euthanasia is immune to the same slippage?
Families across Britain, as we have seen in Europe and increasingly in Australia, will start to think about assisted dying as one of the several options that getting old presents. Just as abortion is now euphemised and celebrated as healthcare, assisted dying will become part of elder care.

Euphemised? Oh FFS and then for no particular reason came a snap of Kamala Harris:

There's no doubt that obnoxious older white men have suddenly felt empowered by the elevation of the mango Mussolini, but all the pond could think was the way that this - the prof's verbiage - was the University of Melbourne showing the real colour of its academic stripes:

Covid was not an advert for state government protection of care home residents. Are we confident they would hold the line when more permissive assisted dying policies are proposed?
A loving family will, of course, want to end the suffering of a loved one. My mum and dad are 85 and 86. There are few days when I do not contemplate how they will die and the role the NHS will play. Passage of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in England may offer us some sort of additional option. But what about the families animated by greed or laziness?
Vested interests, as with the abortion industry, will make access to assisted dying easier and imbue it with moral virtue: “Your dying will help fight climate change.” The pressure on an ailing relative to “let go” will increase. The weakest and most vulnerable members of any society (after children in the womb) will be afforded, across time, fewer and fewer protections. All the while we will be told of the golden age of dignity and choice now upon us.
You start by aborting babies, you end by gassing grandma.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Oh just fuck off with your Nazi rhetoric, while at the same time ambling along with those happy to see women carry their rapist's baby to term, or head off to clink.

What to do about it?

And so to a more pleasant bonus, featuring Mein Gott's outing yesterday, Truly dramatic long-term changes taking place in global power and economic landscapes, Prepare for an explosion of surprising changes across the world stage, from South Korea suddenly emerging to a dramatic social revolution in the US.

It's only a three minute read, or so the reptiles say, and what a relief that Gottliebsen has stepped in to replace the bromancer, who has now been MIA since 9th November, when he proclaimed that Donald Trump's revolution would transform the world.

Luckily Mein Gott is here to explain how sundry matters will transform the world, starting with South Korea:

Protests erupted near the National Assembly building in Seoul on Tuesday, December 3, into the early hours of Wednesday after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law. President Yoon said he would lift his declaration of martial law on Wednesday, according to reports, after the National Assembly voted to end it. Many protesters left after the announcement that the declaration would be lifted, according to reports.

That fired up Mein Gott:

Prepare for an explosion of surprising changes across the world stage.
This week South Korea suddenly emerged on the world stage, but on the US domestic front the abandonment of ‘woke’ management practices by one of the great captains of the cause – Walmart – is just as stunning.

Sorry, at this point the pond is contractually required to interrupt with a woke joke. 

The pond isn't permitted to let 'woke' go uncelebrated, even when used with scare quotes:

The pond regrets the interruption, please allow Mein Gott to step outside his commentary comfort zone:

Accordingly, today I want to take you on a journey outside my commentary comfort zone – the truly dramatic long-term changes taking place in the power and economic landscape as a result of wars in Ukraine and Israel, plus the Trump presidency.
Russia and Iran are now trapped in very tight corners.
Incoming US President Donald Trump, without mentioning Iran, has effectively warned Iran’s administration to arrange the release of the hostages held by its proxy Hamas in Gaza or face severe consequences.

How far out of the zone is Mein Gott? Why he's gone full MAGA, with a snap of US President-elect Donald Trump, singer Kid Rock and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Picture: Kena Betancur/AFP to set the tone:

First up came Ukraine:

The Russia and Iran entrapment means Europe, China and the Middle East could be transformed.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin heads a Russia where 40 per cent of government expenditure is now being directed to war in Ukraine. The cost of living has risen by about 25 per cent and the Russian Central Bank at the end of October raised its key interest rate from 19 per cent to 21 per cent.
There maybe more to come. The Russian ruble has tanked.
The front line resembles a World War 1-style stalemate. At least 115,000 Russian soldiers have been killed and 500,000 wounded since February 2022.
Russia has taken back some of the territory captured by Ukraine in the Kursk region, but that too is now at a stalemate.
Putin’s failed aim to remove Ukraine from its territory reportedly had caused 80,000 new causalities in October/November – North Koreans soldiers were unsuccessful and became troop fodder for the drive to take back Kursk. It’s a long time since we’ve seen a nation like North Korea rail vast numbers of its troops to a foreign land, only to see those troops killed or badly wounded.

Then there was the matter of South Korea, with the reptiles providing a handsome map, and never mind the abject pointlessness of the exercise:

There was only one bit of joy for the pond, it provided a segue to the infallible Pope of the day:

Meanwhile, Mein Gott stayed on what the pond might call his version of Times Radio, what with the pond having heard for the last year or more stories from Times Radio (YouTube) advising that Putin's regime had been soundly thrashed and wouldn't last another week:

Ukraine has regained control of the sea lanes and can export its grain.
The Russian economy is now so war dependent that “peace”, which might see it gain territory, could trigger an implosion of the Russian economy.
Almost certainly president-elect Trump knows this as does Chinese President Xi Jinping who back in February 2023 saw the possibility of an eventual Russian implosion and so instructed China’s Ministry of Natural Resources to issue new map regulations that replace the current Russian names of eight places along the Russian-Chinese border with Chinese names.
Heading the list was the great Russian Pacific port city of Vladivostok which was called Hai Shen Wai before Russia annexed it in 1860 during the second opium war, under threat to set Beijing ablaze. If Xi wants to reverse the 1860 “injustice” there is nothing Putin can do about it on his eastern flank.
On the western flank, most Russian troops have been removed from the border with Finland. Finland is unlikely to invade Russia, but there are no substantial Russian troop numbers on the ground to stop it.
On the other hand, Russia is an atomic power with a dictator in charge who is cornered. It’s dangerous.

The pond is all for the defeat of Vlad the sociopath, and the sooner the better, and can even tolerate a snap of him if it helps bring defeat a little nearer, Russia's President Vladimir Putin visits a prosthetic and a rehabilitation centre for service members in Moscow. Picture: Valery Sharifulin/AFP

What an evil-looking little gremlin.

But the pond is increasingly tired of all the false dawns, while being made to endure Russian state TV, gloating into the vacuum of Joe Biden's vacillations and European weakness:

It's insufferable, and if the pond could smash the smirks off the faces of the likes of Margarita Simonyan (RT) and the truly dire and contemptible Vladimir Solovyov, it would do so cheerfully and in a nanosecond.

But thus far nothing has happened, except that the Russians have taken fresh hope for their war of attrition from nominations of the Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth and Tulsi kind ...

Mein Gott's level of delusion is remarkable, with him deciding that Israel had achieved a stunning victory, which is some fair way of describing ethnic cleansing and an attempt at genocide:

In the Middle East, at huge cost, Israel has achieved a stunning victory, the implications of which are only now becoming apparent.
Not only are Iran’s proxies Hezbollah and Hamas shattered, but Israel and the US now have the ability to bomb out of existence Iran’s nuclear capacity, large areas of its oil industry and the leadership of Iran.
That’s why Trump is giving Iran notice that the US wants the hostages released, or Iran will face the consequences.
Remember this is not spelled out, but Iran knows its vulnerability. Whether Iran can still control Hamas has still to be tested.
Prior to the Israel war, Iran was a dominant force in the Middle East via its proxies. Its influence and that of Russia in Syria is now under challenge, and a whole new set of alliances and forces will emerge.
These international revolutions are taking place amid a dramatic social revolution in the US, which was graphically described by Nick Cater under the heading Trump’s reset has already hit Corporate America. America’s largest retailer Walmart will now make staff appointments purely on merit, regardless of race gender or sexual identity. It will not make suppliers adopt such non-merit practices.
One of the captains of ‘woke’ in Australia, Woolworths currently has its own industrial relations distractions but what is happening in the US will filter down under.

Really this level of triumphalism should be left to the dog botherer. When Mein Gott steps outside his comfort zone, all that can result is discomfort, and bugger all by way of insight.

For no particular reason the reptiles decided to throw in a snap at the very end, Woolworths chairman Scott Perkins and CEO Amanda Bardwell at its AGM in October. Picture: Dallas Kilponen

It was a bitter reminder of how far Mein Gott had strayed from his native turf. He should stick to defending Woollies from strikers and Amazon.

And so to conclude with cartoon news of the day:

And so to the immortal Rowe to wrap things up. Here no cash, or cash here at a price:

For anyone wondering, that back drop is familiar for a reason - it's unemployed men outside a depression soup kitchen opened in Chicago by Al Capone: