'Tis deep in the silly season, and a squab nestled on the pond's table ...

 

As predicted, expected and hoped for, in a FA and FO kind of way, things are going excellently well, what with President Uncle Leon Musk stepping in to shut down the US government, King Donald I agreeing with his President, and the craven GOP in turmoil, with wags having much fun in meme world ...

Both WaPo and the NY Times were in a tail spin about the comedy ...

No need to link to all that malarkey, with more certain to follow.

The Beast provided a handy summary of the comedy ...(soft paywall)

...Musk first intervened with a 4.15 a.m. Eastern time tweet on Wednesday saying, “This bill should not pass,” and it wasn’t until late that afternoon that Trump weighed in with a joint statement with JD Vance urging Republicans to reject the sprawling 1,547-page spending package.
In the intervening 12 hours, Musk posted over 60 updates in his bid to derail the deal.
On Thursday, Democrats, angry that the deal was doomed, took every opportunity to take jabs at Trump, suggesting he’d been usurped by “President Elon Musk” and claiming the president-elect had gone AWOL while the Tesla boss was creating havoc.
As the GOP leadership in the House picked over the debris with a government shutdown looming, a desperate briefing war broke out to help Trump save face.
Two theories were put forward to explain the chain of events. Both underlined just how differently the new administration is likely to look once Trump gets back in the hot seat on Jan. 20.
One Trump source told Axios that Musk driving the debate was all part of the plan and showed how the new administration’s direct approach will work. Musk laid the groundwork and then Trump swooped in to apply the coup de grâce.
The insider said that Republican lawmakers on the Hill received “instant and overwhelming feedback. Before, it had to be slowly funneled through conservative press... [N]ow there is a megaphone.”
Another Trump source from the transition team told the site that Trump was firmly in control, saying: “There are things Elon doesn’t agree with us on that he ain’t getting.”
Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy dialed in on the unity between the two men, saying: “Both men never give up, and follow through even if it seems impossible. You should never bet against Trump or Elon.”
But the “most prominent theory”, sources suggested to Politico, was that Trump initially had no great objections to the spending deal but was “backed into a corner” by Musk.
Musk’s very public opposition to the deal and the groundswell of support he received from the right meant Trump was left “flat-footed”, and he was forced to “chime in” with his Department of Government Efficiency co-chair, said the Playbook report.
The biggest loser appears to be House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has to try and revive a fatally damaged deal with Trump’s insistence on a higher debt ceiling directly at odds with Democrat demands and the clock ticking towards a government shutdown for the holidays.
The biggest winner is Musk, who was doing a victory lap on Wednesday night, tweeting: “Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed!”

Indeed, and a truly bizarre tweet it was ...

A squillionaire imagining that he was both Vox Populi and Vox Dei?! Is there no end to the hubris of a wayward South African?

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) went on CNN to complain about Musk’s “tweetstorm” and said: “You cannot run the world’s greatest democracy by tweet.”
But, as Donald Trump has now discovered, perhaps you can.

Over in The New Yorker, David D. Kirkpatrick was asking in the lead story for the day, Can the U.S. Prevent Syria From Sliding Back into Chaos? (paywall)

The real question of course is can the U.S. Prevent the U.S. from sliding back into chaos ...

The reptiles down under at the lizard Oz studiously ignored all the unseemly fuss that the Chairman Emeritus's mob had helped bring to pass ... though it's surely a preview for the epic awards season follies to follow in the new year ... 

Instead they offered a mundane sampling of local affairs in the silly season ...

Most notable was the fuss in Little to be Proud of land, and the reptiles attempt to keep the "nuking the country to save the planet" chatter alive.

Better to keep on printing the controversy than letting it die a death over the holyday break, and in this they were helped by Satan's little helper himself, turning up in the far right section of the digital edition ...

This allowed Geoff to Chamber an EXCLUSIVE bullet, and the pond thought to itself, why bother with a Labor politician knowingly putting his thoughts behind a paywall so that the reptiles could charge a shekel for his thoughts, when it's possible to see how the reptiles spun the yarn in their EXCLUSIVE takeaway ...

Chris Bowen’s nuclear energy warning: ’Slippery assumptions and conscious mistruths’, Chris Bowen has warned that the Coalition’s nuclear plan will force large industries out of Australia and blow up rooftop solar by forcing nuclear energy into the grid.

The reptiles began the two minute highly Chambered summary with a standard snap, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is leading the Albanese government’s attacks on Peter Dutton’s nuclear energy plan. Picture: Nikki Short / NewsWire

Then it was simmer and reduce, on a low flame ...

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says the Coalition’s energy plan assumes large industries including aluminium smelting will cease operating and warned that forcing nuclear power into the grid will blow up rooftop solar.

Writing in The Australian, Mr Bowen accused opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien of “cooking his own goose” by undermining rooftop solar, which is installed at one in three homes across the country.

A week after Peter Dutton announced the Coalition’s $331bn energy plan, underpinned by up to seven nuclear power plants, Mr Bowen took aim at the Opposition Leader’s modelling based on Frontier Economics analysis. “On the one hand, (Mr O’Brien) argues that nuclear is flexible and ‘load following’, meaning it can be turned down or off for much of the time and therefore works perfectly with, not against, renewables,” Mr Bowen writes.

“On the other hand, he argues costings for nuclear energy should be based on very high capacity factors, that is, nuclear should be regarded as almost always on. Both these assertions can’t be true. You can argue that nuclear is flexible or you can argue it will almost always be on, but you can’t argue both.

“This week, the nuclear report costs author Danny Price (Frontier Economics managing director) admitted … that his modelling is premised on nuclear power being forced into the grid, and forcing solar out.”

Then the reptiles inserted a favourite image as part of an AV distraction:

The Federal government has criticised Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s nuclear ambition. They claimed households with solar panels would be the biggest losers. The opposition is defending its plan, despite Energy Minister Chris Bowen raising multiple concerns.

In the reptile version, they could talk up the mutton Dutton's "vision" thingie ...

In his announcement last week, Mr Dutton said his ­nuclear-powered plan would be $263bn cheaper than Labor’s ­renewables-focused transition.

Under the Coalition, 65 per cent of ageing coal-fired power stations would remain operating until nuclear generation comes online from 2036.

Mr Dutton’s vision is to build, own and operate up to seven nuclear plants at decommissioned coal-fired power station sites in five states, including two small modular reactors and five larger power stations.

Leading Labor’s attacks on Mr Dutton’s net-zero emissions by 2050 blueprint, Mr Bowen framed nuclear as a key election fight that would have “high stakes” for Australia.

“The Parliamentary Budget Office was designed to give oppositions access to high quality and rigorous costing resources. That the alternative government has gone down an alternative road of slippery assumptions and conscious mistruths is one the Australian people are entitled to hold them to account for,” he writes.

How tepid did it get? The reptiles repeated the same image in another AV distraction promoting Sky Noise ...

GovConnex UK Managing Director William Wright says Chris Bowen has mentioned nuclear energy 215 times according to the GovConnex annual trends report. Mr Wright told Sky News Australia that all of Chris Bowen’s nuclear energy mentions would have been “negative”. “Leading into next year’s election, it’s going to be a big topic.”

So the reptiles achieved their aim. The vision thingie was going to be the big topic, and they could make it the centrepiece of a fierce campaign to topple the Labor government and renewables, and keep the clean, innocent, dinkum, virginal Oz coal dream alive... while ostensibly doing a both siderist EXCLUSIVE ...

Mr Bowen, who has highlighted “three fatal flaws” with the nuclear modelling including assumptions that costs would be lower because Australians would use less power and that there was “no need to build transmission to get power into homes”, has attacked Coalition claims their nuclear option would be 44 per cheaper and that lower costs would correlate with reduced power bills.

“Not in my wildest dreams did it occur to me that they would do it by forecasting an economy $300bn smaller than what the government’s plan is based on in 2050,” he wrote.

Mr Bowen said the Liberals were proposing to “sign the taxpayer up for every dollar of the spending they so egregiously under­estimate”.

The reptiles know how to treat a mug punter when he walks into the casino without any understanding that the house always wins ...

Bowen's hidden scribbling is just a way to keep the fuss simmering ...

The pond then turned to our Henry, determined to show that it truly now was the silly season ... Why Notre Dame’s humble neighbour will be missed, Pigeon fancying, once the gentle pursuit of millions, may go the way of stamp collecting. But the humble pigeon will not be so easily defeated.

Pigeons! And accompanying the rats with wings was a truly bizarre AI illustration, captioned “Thank you, dear readers, for accompanying my column on its flight through 2024.”

Usually the pond shrinks these outings, but this was a doozy, worthy of going big ...

How does the pond know that AI's to blame? Well there was no credit, and any attempt to credit it to an individual would surely verge on the defamatory. It was truly, deeply weird, perhaps not in Dali's class even when in severe decline in his dotage, but a genuine schoolboy attempt at the surrealist genre ... and a good match for the words that followed ...

This Christmas, seeing Notre Dame, risen from the ashes, will be a special treat for millions around the world. But while marvelling at its reconstruction, it is hard not to mourn the disappearance of its modest, now largely forgotten, neighbour.

Opened in 1860, housed beneath the cast iron awnings that are Paris’s pride and joy, Covid finally killed it off. It had long teetered on the brink, losing first one seller and then another. But for the city’s pigeon fanciers, the bird market, nestled behind the cathedral, eclipsed even that most dazzling of architectural wonders.

Brimming with portly Mondaines, magnificently plumed Jacobins (which, despite their name, were Queen Victoria’s favourite breed) and sleek Voyageurs that could soar from zero to 60km/h in seconds, there was no better place to while away a quiet hour, particularly on wintry days when nature’s beauty vanishes beneath the gloom.

There, gathered around the finest specimens, were animated clutches of admirers, arguing passionately about the birds’ relative merits. And there too were penniless students, dreaming of hosting a mating pair on the windowsill of garrets that would, decades later, fall victim to Airbnb’s inexorable advance.

The place seemed timeless. But when the market’s predecessor opened, it was literally revolutionary. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, ever greater restrictions had been placed on the right to own, breed or hunt pigeons. As the centralised state tightened its grip, the nobility’s ancient privileges were formalised, culminating in 1699 in laws that limited the ownership of pigeons and other fancy birds to the aristocracy’s highest ranks.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with Smoke rises at Notre-Dame Cathedral in central Paris.

Then our Henry returned to his ode to rats with wings ...

To make things worse, tenants were not allowed to prevent a lord’s pigeons from consuming their crops, with fearsome punishments for transgressors. Given that a thousand pairs of pigeons could consume 200 tons of grain per year, few restrictions caused more unrest in the hungry years that preceded the French Revolution.

Nor was France unusual: similar restrictions prevailed throughout the German principalities and in England. Little wonder then that fancy birds featured so prominently in The Twelve Days of Christmas: no gift could have been more prized, nor more out of reach. And little wonder too that when the Revolution, on August 4, 1789, swept the restrictions away, all of Europe shook.

Suddenly, the pigeon was thrust into mainstream of everyday life. By 1815, modern pigeon racing had taken shape; breeding clubs, and societies of pigeon fanciers, quickly followed.

This was an activity as egalitarian as it was popular: the 19th century, with its mania for rules, developed intricate pedigree systems for horses and dogs, but pigeons were always judged on their calibre, not their ancestry. Easily within the reach of the respectable working class, readily accommodated in cramped backyards, pigeon coops brought nature’s touch to burgeoning metropolises.

Nor was it just a working-class pastime. Charles Darwin, to take but one example, was a keen pigeon fancier, who relished relaxing in the pubs to which London’s fanciers repaired after a day’s racing. And when his publisher sent the Origin of Species to a referee, the referee suggested that Mr Darwin should simply have written a guide to pigeon breeding, for while the Origin was likely to gather dust on booksellers’ shelves, “every body is interested in pigeons”.

“Every body” included Australia. By the 1880s, pigeon racing was integral to colonial life. It is no accident that in Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory, John West starts his life of crime by fixing a pigeon race: a man who could do that was capable of anything.

But trouble was brewing. Just as the pigeon was becoming the working man’s best friend, 19th century Romanticism, with its nostalgia for nobility and the medieval world, glorified a biologically groundless distinction between the pigeon, whose ordinariness the Romantic poets despised, and the alleged purity of the dove.

Did it matter that while racing pigeons can distinguish the letters of the alphabet, Hosea 7:11 tells us that doves are “silly and without sense”? Or that the ancients praised pigeons’ marital fidelity while casting the dove as the symbol of shamelessly promiscuous Venus? And what about the fact that no military couriers ever proved braver than pigeons, winning more Dickin Medals (the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross) than any other animal species?

At this point the reptiles interrupted again, though it was old news, and some hadn't been altogether pleased with the modernist touches added in the rebuild ...

The Daily Mirror Royal Editor Russell Myers discusses the "spectacular" official reopening of Notre Dame in Paris. "It's quite astonishing that they were able to do it in just five years," Mr Myers said. "What a spectacular event and very, very fitting of the moment yesterday."

The pond couldn't wait any longer.

Just like our Henry, the pond is a devotee of rats with wings. 

While the pond was growing up, the pond's grandfather kept pigeons in a loft at the bottom of the backyard, together with some chooks and the odd duck. 

That's what white trash did between meals sent over from the Chinese restaurant across the road when the Chinese owners routinely and kindly took pity on the white trash.

The pond learned to love pigeon flesh and rabbit meat from an early age. 

It was only much later that the pond, in more refined and genteel circumstances, came to understand that pigeon flesh could pass under the radar if you called it "squab". Nothing so vulgar as have a munch on a rat with wings... much like if you called rabbit meat chook, people would happily chow down on bunny.

These days you can find all sorts of recipes on the full to oveflowing intertubes. The NY Times offered one here ... all fancy, with mushrooms and pears ...

There was a plain Jane version here, the kind the pond dined on in Tamworth on a regular basis ...

Nothing beats pigeon or rabbit in a simple roast, if you know how to keep the meat from drying out, but for a variation, one winery dressed up its wines with a squab supplement blessed by a citrus component ...

What pleasure there is in walking down memory lane and remembering all the pigeon meat the pond devoured in its youth, not to mention the odd serve of "squab" in posh restaurants.

Strangely our Henry never seemed to get around to the pleasures of plucking the bird and serving it up, and instead he served up a steaming pile of closing tosh ...

None of that made any difference – and worse was to come. Not only was the unassuming pigeon overshadowed by that ostentatious parvenu, the dove; it was reduced to a pariah.

The assault opened on June 22, 1966, when Thomas P. Hoving, New York’s parks commissioner, lambasted the city’s pigeons as “rats with wings”. Echoed in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, the phrase became a rallying cry for town planners worldwide.

It is unsurprising that the assault on what were now seen as urban anarchists, living where they wanted and flying as they pleased, was led by socialists, the ultimate busybodies. In the USSR, Moscow’s leading planner announced that “millions of these cooing birds are to be banished from the metropolis, sucked up by gigantic vacuum cleaners and resettled in Siberia”.

Ken Livingstone, the socialist mayor of London, followed suit, declaring a jihad on the pigeons of Trafalgar Square. Never to be outdone, Dan Andrews’s Victoria allowed or even encouraged councils to adopt methods of pigeon control it would scarcely contemplate for rabid dogs, let alone doves.

Everywhere, the pigeon – the animal that, as the towering 18th century naturalist, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, put it, shows that “the greatest faithfulness can be combined with the greatest love of freedom” – is on the run. The now decade-long stagnation, in our price index, of the price of turtledoves (which are just pigeons) highlights the entrenched malaise.

No, the clock won’t be turned back. The old bird market’s days are over. Pigeon fancying, once the gentle pursuit of millions, may go the way of stamp collecting, which shares so many of its qualities. The petty tyrants’ assault won’t abate.

But the humble pigeon will not be so easily defeated. A loving individualist, it has learned, throughout the centuries, to specialise in escape, eluding attackers, tenderly nourishing its carefully hidden children, always finding the way home.

This year, when Christmas, which celebrates new life, and Hannukah, with its message of courage and endurance, overlap, that is the spirit we need to toast. Thank you, dear readers, for accompanying my column on its flight through 2024. And may that spirit transport you, soaring on the surest of wings, into a year of health, happiness and, above all, peace.

Well, yes, roasted, and with a serve featuring essence of citrus or a mushroom topping, and you're sure to be transported to a blessed belly ...

For no particular reason our Henry's piece concluded with this set of meaningless factoids ...

As weird and as meaningless as the opening illustration ...

The pond urgently felt the need to elevate the tone, but the meretricious Merritt concluded his piece this way ... It’s time to judge politicians not on their virtue signalling, but their commitment to the principles of the rule of law.

Still with the obnoxious talk of virtue signalling?

Of course it was a severe case of projection, remembering that the reptiles had done their very best to support Benji in his defiance of the ICC ... and remembering the reptiles incessant support for genocide in Gaza throughout the year ...

All the same it was brief, and so the pond let it in ...

World Justice Project survey shows rule of law under threat around the world, The latest survey by the World Justice Project shows that rule of law principles are in trouble – globally and within Australia.

And luckily there was just one snap, a tired AI rehash of a familiar reptile visual theme, With an election on the horizon, we can expect to be deluged with all sorts of promises from politicians about the laws they intend to enact.

The meretricious Merritt then studiously ignored almost everything that was interesting about law breaking around the world, most notably the genocide in Gaza, though another ICC target, Vlad the sociopath, could also have been dragged through the mud ...

In the months ahead, we can expect to be deluged with all sorts of promises from politicians about the laws they intend to enact after the coming federal election.
When assessing those promises you should keep in mind that the erosion of liberty is sometimes dressed up in beguiling terms.
Danger arises when those promises are implemented in ways that disregard the principles underpinning the rule of law. And that is exactly what has been happening here and elsewhere.
The latest survey by the World Justice Project shows that rule of law principles are in trouble – globally and within Australia.
The WJP’s leadership council includes Beverley McLachlan, a former chief justice of Canada; Judy Martinez, a former president of the American Bar Association; and Sir Jeffrey Jowell, who was the founding director of London’s Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law.
The WJP’s latest Rule of Law Index, which was published in October, shows the rule of law declined for the seventh year in a row in most of the countries surveyed.
The decline in Australia was less than 1 per cent, much lower than in most other countries. But some worrying signs are hidden within the overall assessment of this country’s performance.
That assessment is based on eight factors and in five of them, Australia’s performance went backwards last year.
The deterioration in each of these areas was slight, but they point to a worrying trend that should be kept in mind when considering the performance of our governments – state and federal.
According to the WJP, last year saw a reduction in constraints on government power in Australia as well as deterioration in order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice and criminal justice.
The only improvements were in the absence of corruption, open government and fundamental rights.
Australia’s deteriorating performance is not a short-term aberration. Our performance on every one of those factors has declined from peaks between five and nine years ago.
This coincides with the global rise of authoritarian rule that has been identified by the WJP.

“Since 2016, a global rule of law recession has affected 77 per cent of countries studied, including Australia,” according to the WJP.
This country’s overall performance on the rule of law is still stronger than all but 10 of the 142 countries covered by the latest report, but the trend over the past few years is clear.
The rule of law is in trouble. And our governments are to blame.

The long-term decline in all of the factors measured by the WJP suggests Australia’s lawmakers have a faltering commitment to the principles that underpin the rule of law. That needs to change.
In a healthy society, these principles are above party politics and help lawmakers enact policies in ways that preserve the concept of freedom under the law.
They include equal treatment before the law, the separation of powers, the requirement that the law be clear and capable of being known in advance, that punishments can only be imposed in line with the law and, most importantly, the requirement that we are all presumed innocent until the state proves otherwise.
Yet anyone who was witnessed some of the decisions of Australia’s governments could hardly be surprised by the WJP’s findings.
Any government committed to equal treatment before the law would have acted with alacrity to ensure the Jewish community – like all other Australians – enjoyed equal protection from threats of violence. Put that down as a fail.

The pond put that down as a fail ... a fail because the meretricious Merritt had studiously failed to mention some conspicuous examples of other tribes being failed.  In particular...

The reptiles never go there, that's left to the likes of the Graudian here and here or the ABC here and here ...

Even when they attempt to scribble about doing the right thing, the reptiles invariably fall short, and offer their own variant, a dismal kind of "virtue signalling" that ignores all the virtues ... 

Oh, that the pond should be reduced to using such a dismal, hackneyed phrase ...

Those principles, which temper the power of the state, are a bulwark against arbitrary rule – if they are respected by those we elect to parliament.
Now consider how far the federal government has departed from the principle that laws be clear and capable of being known in advance.
Nor is there any sign of legal certainty in the federal government’s use of statutory provisions known as “Henry VIII clauses” which allow ministers to unilaterally change acts of parliament after they come into force so the words might no longer mean what they say. Federal parliament waved through one of these clauses last month when it approved schedule 12 of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Amendment Act.
It says the minister is free to modify that act or any other act or instrument for four years.
On November 11, the bills digest produced by the parliamentary library examined this bill and warned that Henry VIII clauses “should be used in very limited circumstances”.
As the name suggests, they date back to 1539 and the domination of the English parliament by a tyrannical king. That’s a shameful heritage that has no place in a modern democracy.

Oh fair go, the pond has just worked its way through the first Beeb series which culminated with poor old Anne Boleyn losing her head, as preparation for the next Beeb series, knowing in advance that at the end of it Cromwell will lose his (but what fun there'll be with Mark Rylance's glacial staring)... and it's all no more capricious than current politics in the USA, though there the gun is preferred to the axe ...

When it comes to departures from principle, it’s hard to beat NSW. Consider how that state has ignored the requirement that penalties should only be imposed for breaches of the law.
The former Coalition government ignored that when it stripped NuCoal Resources of an exploration licence after it had paid $90m for the licence and spent $40m on exploration and development. NuCoal has never been accused of wrongdoing, nor compensated.
Instead of fixing this, the current Labor administration of Chris Minns has averted its eyes from one of the Coalition’s biggest blunders.
It’s time to judge politicians not on their virtue signalling, but their commitment to the principles of the rule of law.
Chris Merritt is vice-president of the Rule of Law Institute of Australia.

That's the best the meretricious Merritt can offer up?  A piteous plea for dinkum, clean, virginal Oz coal? And yet no mention of the lawless Adani, always a pet reptile provider ...

Ah yes, virtue signalling, but happily Luckovich provides a suitable close ...with a sample of the law in action for the filthy rich ... and with coal featured one last time ...