In which the pond is forced to do the unthinkable ...

 

Relax, take a deep breath, perhaps sob quietly into a hankie, or sit on a Melbourne park bench in deep contemplation, as a growing level of fear and concern courses through the body ...

Does Ainslie Meares's wise park bench words help? 

The bromancer continues missing, either AWOL or MIA.

It was way back on February 26th that he broke bread and insights with the hive mind with Australia, not Europe, is the big freeloader of US power, The real lesson for Australia to understand is that every tough bit of scolding Trump has applied to feckless Europeans applies to us only a hundred times more strongly.

What of the war with China? What of all that has happened while the bromancer has been as mute as a monastic? 

Records are being broken, little Marco is being humiliated, it's a MAGA game show, a pack of tumbling Alice cards ...

Silence, and even worse tomorrow is a travel day for the pond and so dear sweet Henry, that marvel of historical mendacity, will not appear, but instead the pond will be forced to deploy a placeholder ...

The pond guarantees that our Henry will turn up on the weekend, somewhere, somehow ... 

Two reptile losses of such staggering significance would be too much for a possum to bear ...it's like a cyclonic depression bearing down on the pond ...

In the meantime, the pond must make do with lightweights and reptile ne'er do wells of the basest kind ...

That cyclone seems to have distracted the reptiles, and over on the extreme far right, the pickings were slim ...

Dame Groan simply had to be the Friday placeholder - no one else could manage the job - perhaps with Jennings of the fifth form as back-up ...

That left the pond in a pickle, in a black hole. 

Dare the pond do it? Dare the pond go with petulant Peta, long banned from this forum?

Here's the logic. Any reptile, even petulant Peta, going through some form of FAFO, had to be given a guernsey ... to see her take a swim against the Faux Noise tide had to be fun ...

It’s hard to see America made great again if this is the message, There is much to support in the Trump agenda. But it’s almost unimaginable that any previous president would have made a media spectacle of a brave ally so that he could look strong.

The reptiles kicked off proceedings with a clever collage snap ... Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin have much to discuss.

Then the pond began to sup on the petulant one's FAFO tears. 

It turned out that she was no substitute for Henry, as she was stuck somewhere back with Thomas Carlyle ...

Unlike the Marxists and other determinists who think history is shaped by vast impersonal forces beyond anyone’s control, the obvious truth is that individuals make history.
Think of how the world would have been different had Lord Halifax and not Winston Churchill succeeded Neville Chamberlain as British prime minister in 1940: Britain would have sued for peace on the best terms it could get from Hitler.
Likewise, how different would history have been if anyone other than Margaret Thatcher had been British PM after the invasion of the Falkland Islands; or if Pope John Paul II had not been there to ­inspire the Christians of Eastern Europe against their godless communist overlords?
Imagine if John Monash had been killed by a sniper at Gallipoli, or if King Harold hadn’t looked skywards at the wrong moment at the Battle of Hastings.
Indeed, the more we’ve learned about the Nazi sympathies of Edward VIII, the more grateful I am that twice-­divorced Wallis Simpson caught his eye, and the world instead got his brother to lead us through those dark days of World War II and give us his daughter for a historic 70-year reign.

Excellent stuff, forget Herbert Spencer, Tolstoy, Providence and all that jazz.

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace features criticism of great-man theories as a recurring theme in the philosophical digressions. According to Tolstoy, the significance of great individuals is imaginary; as a matter of fact they are only "history's slaves," realizing the decree of Providence.

Instead, valiant Maggie, Jeanne d'Arc for the ages, made an appearance ... Would the Falkland Islands still be in British hands had Margaret Thatcher not been prime minister? Picture: AFP

Carry on Petulant One ...

Who’s in charge, at critical moments, can determine the fate of nations and the wider world. Indeed, nothing is more significant than the human factor in history, given that it’s individuals’ responses to circumstances that determine their ultimate impact.

Individuals' responses?

Then it was time for the Petulant One to brave the Faux Noise hordes ...

Suppose Volodymyr Zelensky had accepted then-president Joe Biden’s offer of a chopper ride to safety on February 24, 2022, when Russia’s tanks first rolled across the border in what was expected to be the quickest of conquests.
No doubt some Ukrainian military units would have put up a sporadic resistance before being slaughtered, and a few hardy civilians would have been defiant before being butchered.
But organised resistance would inevitably have collapsed as soon as the nation’s leader had decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
And just like the earlier Biden-orchestrated scuttle from Kabul, that may have emboldened Vladimir Putin’s military adventurism, and the wider West would again have been humiliated at the hands of the Islamist, fascist and communist dictatorships seeking its destruction.
Instead, Zelensky stayed at his post, survived the numerous death squads sent to kill him, and the precision munitions targeting his various headquarters, to lead his nation in an against-the-odds struggle for three years.

The reptiles followed that up with a snap of the man recently humiliated by a lapdog knob and his king, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky is still fighting for security guarantees for his war-torn country. Picture: AFP

But Faux Noise was triumphant, jubilant, the longest, most boring speech in American history, full of knavish lies, had been a triumph and they danced in the streets with the polls ...

Everybody and his dog was flung into the fray to provide adoring coverage ...

The polls were alive with the sounds of Cantaloupe Caligula music ...

How could the Petulant One take a stand against the renewal of the American Dream?

And yes, his country has paid a heavy price: with millions of Ukrainians sheltering in neighbouring countries, many cities devastated under indiscriminate bombardment, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed or maimed because they decided that it was better to risk death than see their national freedom and independence once more crushed by an imperial bully.
Would it have been better for Zelensky to have told his people that resistance was futile, and they might as well resign themselves to once more living in an oppressed corner of the Russian empire?
Almost certainly, fewer people would have died, even in a brutal Russian occupation, but this raises the existential question that’s echoed through history of whether it’s better to live on your knees or die on your feet.
That’s the question more than 100,000 Australians have resolved in the course of our national existence, largely fighting for others’ freedom, and who earlier generations decided should be honoured at the Australian War Memorial.
In any event, the Ukrainian people, almost to a man and a woman, made the choice to fight, and who is any outsider to say they were wrong – even the President of the United States.

Oh come now, it's easy, just a quick change of script was needed ...

The Petulant One's tendency to FAFO heresies kept rolling out ...

After initially saying a “limited” incursion would be no great issue, Biden and America’s erstwhile European allies gave the Ukrainians enough weaponry not to lose but not enough to succeed in ejecting the Russians from their land. Now, Biden’s successor has decided that none of that should have been gifted to the Ukrainians as America’s contribution to the defeat of contemporary fascism in Europe, but that it must subsequently be paid for by the gifting of much of Ukraine’s latent mineral wealth.
After falsely claiming Zelensky was a “dictator” who’d “started the war”, and was only keeping it going to ride on an American “gravy train”, the leader of the free world unceremoniously expelled from the Oval Office the world’s greatest freedom fighter for the temerity of explaining the mineral deal should also be accompanied by security guarantees.

The reptiles hastily produced another snap ... The Oval Office confrontation between Zelensky and Trump has left the world order in unfamiliar territory. Picture: AFP

Petulant Peta tried to stay the course ...

Could Zelensky have handled it better and said what he said off camera? Absolutely. And of course, if an apology is what it takes to get a renewed American commitment to his country, Zelensky shouldn’t be too proud to make it.
But it’s almost unimaginable that any previous president would have made a media spectacle of a brave ally so that he could look strong. Some have likened Donald Trump’s seeming willingness to force the Ukrainians to make peace with the Russians to Chamberlain’s surrender of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis – but that’s not quite fair because at least Chamberlain, in anticipation of a coming war, massively ramped up aircraft production.

Eventually the Petulant One had to fold, and she dug deep to offer up a gigantic billy goat butt ...

To give the President his due, it should be conceded that – Ukraine and Israel aside – America’s allies have largely been free-riding on America and should have been doing much more for their own national security for at least a generation.
And his domestic agenda, such as securing borders, eliminating government waste, ending the gender confusion, and stopping the net-zero madness, will make America stronger.
There is much to support.
Even the tariffs make sense if applied against China, which has taken advantage of free trade but not practised it; or if applied in a highly selective way, to restore America’s industrial base rather than to punish friends like Canada.

Never mind billy goat butt, it was but a short butt with a brave maple syrup eater thrust into view  ... Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warns about Trump's threat to Canadian sovereignty by imposing 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian goods. Picture: AFP

Brave moose, as the Petulant One wrapped up her FAFO moment ...

Still, it’s hard to see America made great again if the Trump administration’s message to the world is that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.
If, as is claimed, the real objective is to force the Europeans to do more for their own defence, why humiliate Zelensky?
And if, as is further claimed, the objective is to pivot from Russia to the greater challenger, China, why signal disinterest in the fate of a country just because, in Ukraine’s case, it’s far away and perhaps not a perfect democracy?
If all that might commit America to defending another country is immediate self-interest, Taiwan must be deeply regretting starting semiconductor manufacturing in the US.
Likewise, the South Koreans and the Japanese must be wondering how their freedom can be made sufficiently important for this administration to think it worth a single American life.
And what about us, even more reliant on an American alliance for our ­security; what must we do to make a transactional president think we matter to him?
If it’s the human factor that makes history, it’s the human factor that shapes the present and the future too.
When al-Qa’ida terrorists flew planes into the twin towers, we all knew that life had changed in new and terrifying ways.
“America is great because America is good,” de Tocqueville is supposed to have said; and “if America ever stops being good, it will stop being great”.
Is this what’s ahead, or will last week’s Oval Office meeting see the rest of the West lift their efforts, as they surely should, and the US stay the course? We live in challenging and dangerous times.

There was an infallible Pope to go with that talk of the maple syrup lovers ...

Now please keep on relaxing, maintain that Meares moment.

Be assured, Roger of The Times will be here momentarily to Boyes up the pond, but the pond wanted to treasure yesterday's correspondence about knobs ...

Suggestions involving substitutes were made ...

The pond was almost persuaded. Way back in time, the pond's father had regularly turned up after work with the vaguely leftie tabloid The Daily Mirror (at least compared to The Sun and the Packer rag The Daily Terror) and the pond devoured the comics section and so "boofhead" became a favourite Tamworth form of endearment ...

But surely "knob" deserved its moment in the sun ... until there came shattering news ... as the man who'd played the Knob card renounced it ...

But everyone knows he's a prize knob, as celebrated on Colbert, with knobbish AI images doing the rounds ...

What a downer, what a bummer, a prize knob renouncing the use of knob when deployed against a mega MAGA knob ...

Don't apologise, you wretch ...stay true to the knobbish truth ...

The pond remains proudly, defiantly in favour of calling knobs compleat and utter knobs ...

And so to the bonus, from Roger of The Times ...

Kyiv is collateral in Trump’s showdown with Xi, US leader wants swift denouement in Ukraine so he can pivot to main business of his presidency.

Devotees of the bromancer will be hugely relieved ... the war with China was back on, as the reptiles offered up a splendid, albeit uncredited, collage ... President Trump’s team is itching to move on from the depressingly 20th-century war in eastern Europe and gear up for the big geopolitical challenge of the presidency: the face-off with China.

What a compelling tribute to graphic reptile artistry ... and then it was on with the war on China ...

The relentless US attempt to squeeze the breath from President Zelensky continues apace with the freezing of military aid to Ukraine. Even by the standards of Trumpian blitz politik, the speed of this attempted ousting of the Ukrainian leader is jaw-dropping. For three years, Zelensky was hailed as a war hero fighting to keep the Russians out of Europe’s backyard. Now, egged on by the new US administration, the hero seems to be heading for zero.
Why the rush to get him out of the back door? Why the jeering about his war effort? The main cause seems to be resentment at Zelensky’s claims of agency, his irritating assumption that he might have something useful to say in the otherwise promising talks between Russians and Americans.
The fact is, President Trump’s team is itching to move on from the depressingly 20th-century war in eastern Europe and gear up for the big geopolitical challenge of the presidency: the face-off with China. It is this that gives the administration its buzz, even if China barely figures in the public discourse apart from some word-fencing about tariffs. That’s about to change.
The Trump logic in ending the Ukraine war quickly is that it might help declutter the stage, enabling a strategic rapprochement with Russia. That in turn could help the US to weaken the supposedly unlimited friendship between Moscow and Beijing. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has already held out the prospect of economic co-operation with a modernising Russia. There is talk of the US opening the way for Russia returning to the G8.

Yes, yes, Vlad the sociopathic dictator, and mad King Donald united against the dragon, US President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shaking hands during a business leaders event at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, November 2017. Picture: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP

What could go wrong? Full speed ahead ...

The survival of an independent and prosperous Ukraine appears to be of secondary interest. Instead, the priority is preventing the Sino-Russian alliance developing permanent military structures. China has helped Russia’s military-industrial complex throughout the war, covertly transferring dual-use tech and drone production. Some 80 per cent of sanctioned western components arrive in Russia via Chinese private companies. China has become a high-tech hub for President Putin’s Russia.
A “normalised” relationship with the Kremlin, sought by some in the US administration, would mean the phased loosening of sanctions against Russia - and (Washington hopes) a Moscow pivot away from China. Many Russian nationalists have warned over the past three years about the suppressed rivalries with China, in the development of Siberia, in the opening of the melting Arctic sea routes, in Chinese tech saturating Russian markets. All these fears have been brushed aside by the status of Beijing as a discreet war ally. The Chinese, for their part, are uneasy about harnessing themselves to an only moderately successful war leader who regularly threatens the use of nuclear weapons, who had to fend off a mutiny and who deploys thousands of North Korean troops without Beijing’s explicit blessing.

The reptiles had assured the pond it was only a three minute read, but they kept padding it out with snaps, US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, July 2018. Picture: Brendan Smialowski / AFP

Roger did his best as a bromancer substitute ...

There might then be some space for US strategic manoeuvre. One China hawk, Robert Atkinson, of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, has caught the eye of the tech mogul Maga converts. Atkinson compares China to Germany between the late 1880s and the Second World War. Germany weaponised trade, focused on importing goods needed for the war machine, sought control of maritime trade routes, kept its currency undervalued to increase competitiveness and used tariffs and export subsidies to boost steel, chemical and machinery industries. That set Germany on the war path.
Today, it’s China, using similar updated methods to snatch global leadership in electric vehicles and commercial nuclear power; to challenge the US on AI, quantum computing, robotics, semiconductors. That’s translating into military nimbleness, developing so-called wingman drones that are at the heart of the race between China and the US for air superiority. The tech competition will be central to the next war - for control and conquest of Taiwan, for example.
Ukraine has been a testing ground for an army using and adapting modern tech to even up the odds against a numerically superior Russian army. But although Zelensky’s Oval Office critics claim to be motivated by wanting to stop the killing - a necessary precondition for the Nobel peace prize shortlist - their main concern seems to be about the US winning in the next big global challenge.

The final snap featured Faux Noise, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to Fox News just hours after a combative meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office.

That raised yet again a pressing question.

When will the bromancer return to begin a triumphant tour of duty in the impending war with China?

The pond can't live on Roger of The Times alone ...

For starters, and closers, it was hard to work out whether Roger of The Times was ecstatic at his prophetic insight, or a bit glum about Ukraine being thrown under the bus.

The suspension of US arms deliveries will not necessarily end the war. Only 20 per cent of military hardware supplied to the Ukrainian military now comes from the US; 55 per cent is home-produced in Ukraine, while the remaining 25 per cent comes from Europe and the rest of the world. But it is a gesture: the US component includes some of the most lethal and advanced arms systems. Without those, the war will slow, Russia may gain momentum and the calculated humiliation of Zelensky will be stretched out.
It’s a cynical gamble that aims for a political result: the resignation perhaps of the Ukrainian leader, a peace conference that allows Putin to hold on to land he has snatched and held. Will that achieve the strategic aim of weakening the China-Russia axis? Probably not. But if it’s any consolation to Zelensky and his nation of warriors, they never stood a chance; they were always doomed to lose the endgame when the new US president started to yawn about a war that interfered in his plans for historic victories elsewhere. The Ukrainians simply became collateral in a geopolitical turn of the screw. Nothing personal, Trump’s men will say after a “peace” is declared. No hard feelings.
The Times

No hard feelings, just on with world war III ... and if that isn't a chance to segue to the immortal Rowe, the pond has lost the art of throwing up ...

It's all in the details ...

... and it's also all in the wide shot ...

Sssh, don't mention Faux Noise, just enjoy nodding off with nattering "Ned" and wallowing in Mein Gott's insights ...

 

Lesson from Smith street: you can fool many of the hipsters most of the time ...

That such things should still be ...

Lesson from the lizard Oz: you can keep on trying to fool the hive mind day in and day out ...

Sheesh, the world going to hell in a handbasket, and all the reptiles have done - and keep doing - is give it an obliging push ...

Look, over there, on the extreme far right, Dame Slap rabbiting on in her usual way ...Postgrad students became a captive audience when forced to endure a lengthy slide show hectoring them on how poorly women were doing in the law and how the rich were doing very nicely.

It was as if the tinkling Trinca, tinkling on yesterday about equal pay for women, had passed through one Dame Slap ear and out the other without encountering any grey matter at all ... as she tried to sell the hive mind on the suffering of the rich.

A MAGA cap wearer, and all she can do is blather on about gender issues and the suffering rich while the world goes to hell in a handbasket thanks to her cult?

The pond couldn't bear it, and yet the alternative, "Ned" at the top of the sigital world ma, was too exhausting to think about.

The pond needed some good news so it could crank into gear. Luckily there was this ...Tesla electric car sales plunge again in Australia – Model 3 down more than 81 per cent.

Giles Parkinson put a spring in the pond's step.

The plunge in Tesla electric vehicle sales has continued into February, according to the latest official data, with combined sales of the Model Y and Model 3 EVs plunging 71.9 per cent in the month of February, compared to the same month a year earlier.
The data from the Electric Vehicle Council shows that Tesla recorded just 1,592 EV sales in February, down from  5,665 for  February last year. For the first two months of the year, sales have slumped 66 per cent to 2,331 from 6,772 in 2024.
Tesla supporters insist the sales plunge – which is also intense in European countries – is only the result of inventory levels and customers waiting for refreshed Model Y, and some increased competition.
But most analysts and observers also point to the influence that CEO Elon Musk is having on the market because of his partnership with US president Donald Trump and his open support for far right political causes.
In Australia, sales of the Model Y fell to 924 in February from 2,072 in February last year. If that were to be the result only of inventory issues and customers waiting for the refreshed Model Y, it does not explain the 81.4 per cent fall in Model 3 sales to just 668 units in February, from 3,593 in the same month of 2024, and 2,671 in February, 2023.

And so on ... more at the link. 

And then John Handscombe turned up in the pond's email with The Echnida and put a smile on the pond's face ...Knob: the one little word which sums up what we're thinking.

Knob! The pond rarely uses the word, and yet it's distilled essence of Tamworth. 

Handscombe honoured his source and then put the word to most excellent use ...

Roger Cook went up in my estimation yesterday for doing what most politicians assiduously avoid. At an event staged by The West Australian newspaper, the WA premier was asked to finish a sentence, "JD Vance is a ..."
"Knob," he replied.
In that one word, he summed up what most of the world beyond Russia is thinking. If only our federal pollies, Jacqui Lambie the possible outspoken exception, were as candid. Honesty is a rare commodity in politics.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, a knob is the slang term for "An annoying, unpleasant, or idiotic person (esp. a man or boy)". Cook apologised for employing it, said he was allowed one unprofessional moment on stage, but he needn't have.
Social media was awash yesterday with videos of Vance's past assessments of Donald Trump. Wouldn't vote for him. Thought he was leading America's white working class to a very dark place. America's Hitler.
Only a knob would say all those things in 2016 and then hitch his wagon to Trump in 2024. Only a knob would tell Europe it was the problem, not Russia and China. Only a knob would carry on the way Vance did in the Oval Office when he laid into Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week.
Of course, as the premier of the most isolated state in the world, Cook can let fly with the odd angry epithet. Let's face it, on the world stage he has the profile of a spilled drink. And if Donald Trump didn't know what an AUKUS was - as he revealed during UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's visit - he wouldn't have the foggiest about Roger Cook. Nor would JD Vance.
In fact, Cook's assessment of Vance would have gone largely unnoticed "over east" were it not for a brief mention on The Guardian's rolling news blog. But it is worth celebrating because there's been a fair deal of knobishness in the way our federal pollies have handled the whole Trump disaster.
The Coalition and its cheerleaders have found themselves in a particularly awkward position. The triumphalism they displayed after Trump's inauguration now smells like last week's unwashed socks.
Sussan Ley's likening of the First Fleet to Elon Musk's Mars aspirations looks especially foolish now his name is poison across much of America and the rest of the world.
Tesla stocks have tanked after the billionaire's stiff arm salute on inauguration day. And his pimply DOGE squad has ineptly cancelled vital federal work like overseeing the nuclear arsenal and controlling air traffic.
Republican representatives in MAGA counties are being howled down by the angry mob that elected them as veterans are laid off, grocery prices spike and everything seems more miserable than it did before the election.
Yet Dutton is clinging to a similar cost-cutting program to the federal public service here, without letting on where those cuts would fall. But to be fair, at least the Opposition Leader has toned down his Temu Trump posturing in recent days. He even said Trump was wrong to call the Ukrainian President a dictator who started the war with Russia...

And so on - sorry, no link, you need to subscribe if only for the accompanying immortal Pope 'toon - but eventually the pond has to look at the knobs in the lizard Oz, and so nattering "Ned" strutted on to the pond's stage to bore the pond senseless in his usual Everest climb way ...

A six, endlessly tedious, minute read, the reptiles said, as "Ned" did his Chicken Little routine about what the Faux Noise crowd had helped bring into being ...

Trump’s strongman tactics serve to diminish America, Donald Trump brings a reality-TV culture and real estate mentality to his rewriting of history and promotion of lies from the President’s office.

Naturally the reptiles began with a snap from that infamous meeting ... US president Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance have contempt for Volodymyr Zelensky as a democratic leader. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

Then "Ned" fired up, the real deal knobbing away about "realities" ...

Beneath the Trump-Vance-Zelensky debacle in the Oval Office lie two realities – Donald Trump’s adolescent-like sensitivity to the slightest criticism and, more important, his profound contempt for historical norms and the strategic rationale that have long guided US global policy.

Trump is ahistorical. While all his predecessors since Harry Truman have seen US alliances as force multipliers that accentuate American influence and power, Trump brings a “dollars and cents” accounting to US dealings with the world, fixated on a transactional balance sheet that means a shrinking American impact.

He believes the EU was “formed to screw the United States”. He blames Ukraine for the war triggered by Russian aggression. He has no conception of a post-war world aspiring to uphold sovereign rights and democratic freedoms. Trump brings a reality-TV culture and real estate mentality to his rewriting of history and promotion of lies from the President’s office.

Ukraine is a template for Trump-Vance thinking about the world. They have a contempt for Volodymyr Zelensky as a democratic leader. They have no attachment to Ukraine as a sovereign democracy.

“They may be Russian some day, or they may not be Russian some day,” Trump said. He seemed not to care. He assumed no great principle at stake. But his preference for Vladimir Putin over Zelensky was undisguised.

And yet, over at Faux Noise, here's a reality ...

These kissing cousins with "Ned" never bother to hide their ongoing preference for the Cantaloupe Caligula and his worship of Vlad the sociopathic Impaler.

It goes on undisguised, on a daily basis ...

There's a prime knob interviewing a prize knob, and note the line at the very bottom ..."their war against Russia."

It's not "their war" you compleat knobs, it's Vlad the sociopathic Impaler's war ...

As always, "Ned" remained completely clueless about what his kissing cousins were up to ...

Trump’s instincts are to flatter or bully. He flatters Putin and bullies Zelensky, his contemptible ultimatum to the Ukrainian leader being “make a deal or we are out”. A threat issued in public before the world. Trump’s subsequent decision to pause all military aid to Ukraine is predictable and defining – he acts as Putin’s agent.

His aim is to weaken Ukraine, discredit Zelensky, blame Zelensky for anything that goes wrong and impose a peace without any US security guarantee, a peace that manifestly cannot endure.

Trump’s frustration with Zelensky is fanned by the Ukrainian leader’s insistence that Putin cannot be trusted and will break any agreement. Of course, it’s true. Zelensky knows only a US security guarantee can underwrite a war settlement, but Trump and JD Vance oppose any such US guarantee, the pivotal concession to Putin.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction ...

US President Donald Trump has launched another attack on his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky. He criticised the Ukrainian leader for suggesting an end to the war with Russia is “very, very far away”. President Trump believes America’s aid has been integral for Ukraine, and it should be more thankful. “Well, I just think he should be more appreciative because this country has stuck with them through thick and thin. We’ve given them much more than Europe, and Europe should have given more than us,” he said.

That managed to regurgitate the Cantaloupe Caligula in fine style ... while "Ned" kept on scurrying about like a white rabbit, lost down a rabbit hole of the Chairman Emeritus's making ...

The President’s senior office holders fall into line. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once a champion of Ukraine, now parrots Trump’s anti-Zelensky diatribes.

Trump’s fascination with Putin is a bizarre blend of strongman self-identification and strategic calculation. Although Putin’s war has killed thousands of Ukrainians, Trump told Zelensky that “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me” – a reference to the Russian election interference saga.

Yet his affinity with Putin is folly and guaranteed to rebound against Trump. Trump keeps saying Putin wants a deal. We shall see. Why would Putin agree to a ceasefire when a foreshadowed condition is a European military presence in Ukraine, which Putin believes is Russian territory? Trump may be shocked to find Putin won’t fall into the alignment he expects.

The ultimate issue here is Trump’s strategic transformation of US attitudes, policies and beliefs. Trump has reversed Joe Biden’s policy from support of Ukraine to de facto backing for Putin.

At this point the reptiles inserted a snap of the new Faux Noise hero, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Picture: Pool/AFP

The pond wondered why it bothered with herpetology studies. Jon Stewart was much more to the point when he turned to wrestling to explain what went down, (YouTube) and the way that the Trump/knob JD tag team had done a "heel turn" ...

The pond knew enough about the art to know what a heel turn meant, and that poor Zelensky was done over by a couple of expert knob heels ...

"Ned" wanted to turn this ridiculously cruel wrestling routine into a pompous pontification ...

He lacks any moral or strategic view of a democracy under threat from an autocratic power. He refuses to distinguish ally from foe in his unilateral imposition of tariffs. He signals a US retreat from European security and a diminished commitment to NATO that for 70-plus years has prevented a major power conflict in Europe.

How far Trump will push US disengagement remains unknown – maybe he will pull back – but he functions as a unilateral wrecker of an alliance that has every reason to endure albeit with a major reallocation of the burden to Europe. Above all, Trump has given the autocratic powers – Russia and China – what they most craved: a strategic fracture between America and Europe.

And Trump doesn’t seem to care. Putin and China’s Xi Jinping will be surprised but ecstatic. They couldn’t have pulled it off – but Trump has gifted them.

Trump could not be clearer, saying a fortnight ago: “This war is far more important to Europe than it is to us. We have a big beautiful ocean as separation.”

Here is the strategic heart of the matter. For Trump and Vance the cycle of history has turned full circle. They operate beyond the legacies of World War II, the Cold War and “end of history” liberalism because they are convinced such global commitments have eroded American life and treasure, damaged the US heartland, been exploited by ungrateful allies and must be urgently reversed.

They cast themselves as hyper-realists when they are engaged in hyper-delusions. Trump is functioning on trade, security and diplomacy as an agent of destruction. He offers no considered statement about his global view but prefers to keep everybody guessing.

The elemental signs are that he seeks a great power triangular, competition among strong men – himself, Xi and Putin, a recipe for political narcissism, rising nationalism, the law of the jungle and the rule of the strong.

In a confused Breitbart interview, Rubio tried to impose coherence on the unfolding Trumpian chaos. “The big story of the 21st century is going to be US-China relations,” Rubio said. “If Russia becomes a permanent junior partner to China in the long term, now you’re talking about two nuclear powers aligned against the United States.”

It's not just Trumpian chaos, it's Faux Noise inspired chaos, as the network continues, against all odds, to operate as a state government mouthpiece down there with Russian state media ... cue another snap, US President Donald Trump speaks as Secretary of State Marco Rubio looks on during a cabinet meeting at the White House. Picture: AFP

Not a single joke about stone-faced little Marco sinking into the couch? 

Sheesh, if only "Ned" would watch the occasional late night TV host, a Colbert, or even a Kimmel (stop beforer the Oscars)... or a Seth Meyer, who had great fun with stone-faced liddle Marco as he turned stone-cold heel ...

The pond began to feel an urgent need for a relieving cartoon, but pressed on ...

Rubio implied that Trump might attempt a reverse Nixon – to pull Russia away from China. “We have to have a relationship with both,” Rubio said, because “these are big, powerful countries with nuclear stockpiles” and “they can project power globally”. It would not be a “good outcome for us” if Russia became purely dependent on China.

Trump has big hopes for Russia. In February he held a long phone call with Putin, ending US isolation of the Russian leader followed by more US-Russian official dialogue. The message: Trump is elevating Putin’s status. He wants co-operation, closer economic ties and US-Russia deal-making starting with Ukraine.

Trump lauded “the Great History of our Nations” going back to World War II. This is what Putin craves, being installed as some kind of great power peer that disguises Russia’s real weakness.

Any idea all of this might be good for Australia is a fool’s conclusion. A Trump sellout of Ukraine and retreat from Europe will reverberate around the world. It will encourage America’s enemies, seed distrust among its friends and alarm its allies.

Oh heck, the pond just had to break ...

In the usual way, "Ned" quickly got over Ukraine, and made it all about us. What about me, standing there at the corner store, all out of luck, it isn't fair ...

In the Indo-Pacific it is likely Trump and Rubio will talk up the value of alliance partners, but who can be sure?

Leadership is about character and war accentuates the character of leaders. Trump’s character is on display before the world. This is not the character of Dwight Eisen­hower, of John Kennedy, of Ronald Reagan. Nations in the Indo-Pacific will recognise what is happening – that Trump has a transactional mentality, that he obsesses about correcting the alleged exploitation of America by all and sundry, that he doesn’t discriminate between friend and foe in imposing his punitive tariffs, that his preferred modus operandi is cutting deals with fellow strongmen, that he speaks with a loud voice but is devoid of the consistency, conviction and temperament to run a stance of credible strategic deterrence.

Trump projects as a leader who is unreliable and untrustworthy. This is the decisive conclusion from his early weeks in office. Are we seeing the authentic Trump or will he change and adapt? Who could know?

Neither Anthony Albanese nor Peter Dutton will retreat from our deep commitment to the US – neither should they. But privately they will be deeply worried. Trump has arrived determined to stamp the world with his America-first brand of economic protection and alliance scepticism. He pledged to Make America Great Again but what’s on display isn’t a tenable domestic political strategy. America is being diminished before our eyes.

Neither should they? But the mutton Dutton wants to make Australia great again, and wants to walk with King Donald, while Albo still smiles a delusional AUKUS smile ...

After that pleasing infallible Pope mix of climate change and AUKUS, the pond had the strength to turn to Mein Gott. 

Sure, it's now as stale as yesterday's fish left out in the noon day Tamworth sun, but as soon as Mein Gott let loose wise words to rabbits, to be "very, very careful", the pond knew it had to listen to the Master ...

Australia must be very careful following Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy Oval Office clash, The great danger for Australia is we will be so appalled at what happened in the Oval Office we will not understand the underlying forces and their long-term impact on us.

Ah, the mystical underlying forces, which only Mein Gott could unveil, but first a snap ... Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen. Picture: Jeremy Piper/NewsWire

Time to get on with the unveiling of the mystical underlying forces ...

It is vital for Australians to understand that behind the events in Oval Office was a global change of historic proportions. Nothing like this has happened since World War Two. Had former President Joe Biden stood for re-election and won, he would have faced the same new forces now impacting the current administration. Of course, Biden would have handled those forces differently.

Back to the Oval Office. US Vice President JD Vance, either deliberately (as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suspects) or accidentally, set a trap for Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Sadly, the war ravaged Ukraine president, was not skilled enough to avoid the televised public brawl with US President Donald Trump that followed.

Isn't it just a couple of prize knobs turning heel? US President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy listen to Vice President JD Vance as they meet in the Oval Office of the White House. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

Or maybe it's that other pro wrestling trick designed to fire up the crowd ...

Never mind, back to blather about underlying forces ...

The great danger for Australia is that we will understandably be so appalled of what happened in the Oval Office that we will not understand the underlying forces behind the event and their long term impact on Australia and Australian enterprises.

Accordingly, we must isolate the new forces and combine them with the new pillars of US foreign policy that have been set out by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

For the last 70 years, the US has been clearly the supreme global military power.

In recent times, America’s defence capacity has declined when compared to China. The US made strategic equipment mistakes and put too much effort into wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, China invested heavily in new technology and the benefits are starting to emerge.

The message China was conveying to Australia when it circumnavigated our continent was that in naval (and air power) China is vastly superior to Australia and that it is at least equal to US and in some areas superior.

Elon Musk in his public statements clearly shows he understands what has happened, so we can assume that both Trump and Vance also understand the new reality, although they will never publicly admit it.

Accordingly, the US is now in no position to fight two wars – Ukraine and the Middle East – as well as facing an ever-increasing danger in the Pacific.

Trump and Vance decided that the Middle East and the Pacific were more important to the US than Ukraine, which was essentially a European matter. Leaving aside the danger of a nuclear war, if Ukraine war “victories” push Russia into becoming a satellite of China, then America clearly becomes the second ranking military power to China-Russia.

What do we have to worry about?

Sorry the pond was getting a little restless at the way that Mein Gott seemed to be celebrating the way that we all needed to get on board with a criminal, war-mongering dictator ...

And the US needs Russian help to achieve its aims in the Middle East, and that help was unlikely to be delivered if the two countries were fighting in Ukraine.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio sets out clearly that all his US State Department activities must meet an overriding test for current and future actions. Are they are in what the Trump administration believes are in the interest of the US? If they fail that test, they will usually be dropped.

That overriding doctrine could be heard in the Oval Office exchange and is clearly illustrated in the Ukraine peace settlement proposal, which is linked to rare earths production where the US is currently dependent on China.

Cue another snap ... US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Picture: Charly Triballeau, Elvis Barukcic/AFP

That inspired Mein Gott to take stone-faced couch-sinking little Marco seriously ...

And in the Middle East, Rubio sets out two base US aims:

• The Hamas treatment of hostages means that Hamas must not be allowed to have any role in governments anywhere in the Middle East.
•  Iran must not have nuclear weapons because the regime has used any spare money it generated to fund organisations like the Yemen rebels, Hezbollah and Hamas, plus Syria. An Iran with nuclear weapons would have a devastating impact on the region. The US hopes that Russia will come to a similar view. There is little doubt that US support of Russia in Ukraine is linked to Russian support for the US Iran policy. The US-Russia conference in Saudi may have also embraced the issue of oil prices. Russia desperately needs high oil prices to regain solvency.

Oh come on, we know the real aims ...

No doubt Vlad the sociopathic impaler will be pleased to make it a joint venture.

And after all that, is it possible to take Mein Gott seriously as he turns to the corner store, and sings "what about we?"

When it comes to Australia in all our dealings with the US, we need to pitch our proposals in a way that shows benefit to America. And we also need to understand that the US views defence arrangements to be in a different basket to tariff/trade issues. In our remarks on tariffs, Australia often mixes defence and tariffs, which simply shows the Americans that we don’t understand the intricacies of current US policy as set out by Rubio.

In steel tariffs, we can show the US how America benefits by importing some 300,000 tonnes of Port Kembla steel which is integrated into the BlueScope US steel making and processing operation which is larger than the Australian one. If we have argued steel on the basis of US benefit, we have a very good chance.

I fear we mixed it with aluminium which is totally different and, in any event, the energy policies of Energy Minister Chris Bowen means that, according to Rio Tinto, some Australian aluminium plants will be put out of business because of the looming dramatic rises in electricity costs. The tariffs are almost an irrelevancy.

He fears? That's all he's got to fear about it as Faux Noise guides us to hell in a handbasket?

The reptiles followed that with a couple of local figures who routinely inspire reptile fear, hate and loathing, Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen. Picture: Jeremy Piper/NewsWire

Then it was just a sprint to the wrap-up ...

And, of course, vast areas of Australian industry also face higher power prices.

The aim of the US Ukraine discussions was to implement an agreement whereby the US would invest substantial sums in Ukraine rare earth processing. That deal my eventually come to pass, but Australia needs to put up its hand and show our rare earths can also be used to limit Chinese dominance. But we can’t offer ourselves as a place to refine or smelt rare earths without competitive energy policies. Ukraine may have the benefit of low cost Russian gas as part of a peace deal, which brings us back to the forces that triggered the exchange in the Oval Office and the Europe countries conference that followed.

A bringing together of the parties in Europe is similar to what happened in the Middle East after Trump’s Gaza plan. Maybe Merz is right and the Oval Office Vance trap was planned.

Put it another way ...

The pond realised at this point that it hadn't really got into the tariff wars, but the reptiles assured the pond that this was less than a 2 min read, and it did feature the wondrous sight of the WSJ doing a FAFO routine ...

Trump takes the dumbest tariff plunge, We’ve courted Donald Trump’s ire by calling the Mexico and Canada levies the ‘dumbest’ in history, and we may have understated the point. He’s whacking friends, not adversaries. The WSJ Editorial Board

There was just one visual interruption, President Trump previously delayed the tariffs for a month to negotiate on curbing fentanyl and migration, but his team has indicated he is not satisfied.

Then the WSJ reptiles got down with their FAFO routine ...

President Trump likes to cite the stock market when it’s rising as a sign of his policy success, so what does he think about Monday’s plunge? The Dow Jones Industrial Average took a 650-point header after he announced that he’ll hit Mexico and Canada on Tuesday with 25 per cent tariffs.

Mr Trump said at the White House there was “no room left” to negotiate with the two American trade treaty partners. Some of his smarter advisers have been hoping he’d start renegotiating the USMCA and delay the tariffs. But Mr Trump wants tariffs for their own sake, which he says will usher in a new golden age.

We’ve courted Mr Trump’s ire by calling the Mexico and Canada levies the “dumbest” in history, and we may have understated the point. Mr Trump is whacking friends, not adversaries. His taxes will hit every cross-border transaction, and the North American vehicle market is so interconnected that some cars cross a border as many as eight times as they’re assembled.

Mr Trump also objected when we reported an analysis by the Anderson Economic Group that the 25 per cent tariff will raise the cost of a full-sized SUV assembled in North America by $9,000 and a pick-up truck by $8,000. Is this how the new Republican Party plans on helping working-class voters?

Mr Trump is volatile, and who knows how long he’ll keep the tariffs in place. Retaliation that hits certain states and businesses may also cause him to reconsider sooner than he imagines. Investors are trying to read this uncertainty as they also watch growing evidence of a slowing US economy. Unbridled Tariff Man was always going to be a big economic risk in a second term, and here we are.

The Wall St Journal

Here they are, the WSJ and the lizard Oz reptiles, apparently entirely unaware of what their kissing cousins at Faux Noise continue to do ...

The pond was inclined to celebrate that conspicuous folly by closing with an immortal Rowe ...

It's always in the Faux Noise details, abiding in the gutter below that portrait of a prize knob ...

In which the swishing Switzer perfects his Neville Chamberlain routine ...

 

For those wondering what happened to ye olde Melbourne, this can be found near the Treasury building in the park off Spring Street ...

Bizarre, but more on supplicant women down the page. 

For those interested in Billy Clarke, Bart, Toorak squatter supreme, he has a wiki here, and is at the ADB here ...

Enough of ancient Victorians (in every sense of the word), time to look at modern lickspittle, fellow- travelling reptile quislings ...

The reptiles are still in election campaign mode, but over on the extreme far right, the Cantaloupe Caligula was the centre of attention ...

The pond can safely ignore Magnay's musings. 

What would a woman know, why pay any attention to her? (See how thoroughly the pond has been infused with reptile values).

Poor old Maximus from The Times tried to hold off the quisling, Vichy horde, and to get past him quickly, the pond stripped him of snaps and AV distractions, and as one featured petulant Peta, the pond was pleased to do it ...

Trump will pay historic price for his treachery, The President’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky leaves the western alliance in its gravest crisis since 1945 — but we must pull through.

Hastings hastily did a quick Henry and wandered back in time ...

Amid turbulence greater than has rocked the Atlantic alliance since 1945, it does no good merely to pile the abuse mountain higher.
The West’s predicament is so serious that it would waste verbiage to reprise obvious truths about Donald Trump. We must instead reflect on precedents and explore future courses. Have we ever been here before? Think Poland.
Winston Churchill in 1945 was distraught that the nation for whose freedom Britain had gone to war with Adolf Hitler should fall into the bloody maw of Joseph Stalin. The prime minister stood accused of naivety in making a deal at Yalta for Polish free elections that the Russians had no intention of honouring. Yet Churchill saw no choice save to trust Stalin when the dying president Franklin Roosevelt refused to quarrel with the Kremlin. Moreover the Americans arguably displayed a realism from which the British recoiled, by acknowledging that the Russians occupied Poland. The Red Army had got there first. 
In May 1945 Churchill, despairing and frustrated at finding the Yalta deal betrayed, ordered Britain’s chiefs of staff to draw up a plan for the Western allies to expel the Russians from Poland by force. The outcome was Operation Unthinkable, a blueprint for an assault by 47 US and British divisions. In this amazing document the chiefs used the adjective “hazardous” eight times.
Their chairman, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, wrote in his diary: “The whole idea is of course fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible.” The planners observed that “even if our objective is no more than a square deal for Poland, the scope of such a conflict would not be ours to determine. If (the Russians) want total war, they are in a position to have it.” When the Unthinkable proposal was submitted to Washington, the new Truman administration unhesitatingly dismissed it. Poland was served on toast to the Kremlin.

Ukraine’s plight is different, but there seem four relevant points: the Russians have achieved military ascendancy there; justice plays scant part in international relations; Vladimir Putin is playing Stalin’s old Polish game; yet we cannot launch an Operation Unthinkable.
If the US continues to refuse air support for European military peacekeepers in Ukraine, there will be no such deployment. The likeliest consequence of the Trump administration’s withdrawal, if persisted with, is that Volodymyr Zelensky’s country will become, sooner or later, a Russian vassal state like Belarus, and probably Georgia, just as did Poland in 1945. 

Indeed, indeed ...

While Maximus trotted out a form of abject surrender, at least he was dismayed by his meekness and defeatism ...

With the Americans offering shameless support to Putin and shameless animosity to Zelensky, the Europeans lack the military power, and probably the will, themselves to protect Ukraine.
We should certainly not acquiesce in Zelensky’s martyrdom, a tragedy not only for Ukraine but for freedom everywhere. Our leaders must continue to strive to keep the Americans in the game by urging a peace plan on Washington. We should ship all such arms as we can muster for as long as the Ukrainians continue to fight, and it is welcome that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer confirmed the commitment to do this.
But we cannot rearm ourselves remotely fast enough to undo the consequences of Trump’s treachery – and his actions, if persisted with, indeed represent treachery to America’s historic allies.
Britain must strengthen its defences on a scale thus far unspoken of if it wishes to have any voice in an ugly new world in which might is right. I am doubtful whether Starmer is yet ready to embrace such radical action. We must think beyond the immediate threat to an epochal future requirement to protect ourselves without much America.
The British government should continue to address the Trump administration with superhuman restraint but concede no point of principle, and recognise that mere subservience will get us nothing. Trump respects only strength. Compassion is not in his lexicon. He seeks to divide and rule US allies; to break the economic power of the EU by promoting the political power of the extreme right and fracturing European unity. He appears willing, for today at least, to treat Britain with a certain regal condescension because he applauds our separation from the continent.

Nah, he's just a King who likes to mingle with his peers, you know, talking tampons of the King Chuck kind ...

Phew, you can rely on Rowson for a nightmare vision ... but he does catch King Chuck's resemblance to a lobster ...

Meanwhile, Maximus rolled on to a defeatist conclusion ...

His mood is liable to change tomorrow, however. Britain is a liberal democracy. He is in the business of destroying such polities. I have often urged recognition of the fact that, forgetting nonsense about the special relationship, a lot of Americans do not like us, and such Americans are now in charge. A mere state visit will not change that.
We can traffic with Trump only with extreme caution, while prioritising unity with our neighbours and the other old allies. It is problematic whether we can continue full intelligence-sharing with Washington, amid uncertainty about what Trump’s security appointees may tell Moscow.
Few students of global strategy expect this generational crisis – which Starmer’s words at the summit acknowledged as such – to end any time soon. It is unlikely that accord can be restored between Washington and Kyiv. Despite emotional protestations of the Europeans’ goodwill, their real strength of purpose seems doubtful, about rearming on a scale to compensate for American retreat.
Trump revels in high noons at which he casts himself in the principal role. He is sustaining a strike rate of almost one a day, exhausting hundreds of millions of horrified spectators around the world. We are being called on to hold our nerve, to sustain a sense of order, calm and commitment to reason, when none of these things is on offer from Washington.
Somehow we shall come through. But the people of the US may discover themselves paying a historic price for what is happening, through a collapse of respect for their country and of faith in its word. The betrayal of Ukraine, amid televised presidential conduct such as few mafia bosses would stoop to, can be forgiven only if Trump changes course.
There. I have failed. Despite an expression of good intentions in the first lines of this column, it has proved impossible to complete it without adding to the abuse heaped upon America’s most deplorable president.
The Times

Oh it's grim stuff, and the vibe isn't a good one ...

Time to move on then to one of the most deplorable and contemptible of lizard Oz columnists, the swishing Switzer ...

Trump’s goal to end Ukraine war makes moral sense, Many people find it unconscionable to negotiate with Putin and give up on Ukraine’s efforts to roll back Russia’s gains. But this is the cold, hard reality: Russia controls about 20 per cent of Ukraine, which is outmanned and outgunned on the battlefield.

Yes, we've left old Maximus behind, and we're deep into sell-out territory, with "quisling" utterly incapable of conjuring up the depths of betrayal. Perhaps Lord Haw-Haw would be more appropriate.

The reptiles began with a snap of that moment ...US President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky meet in the Oval Office.

It left out the real snarling, slapping cat in that exchange ...

So to the sell-out by the master of lapdog Vichy speak ...

Friday’s heated exchange in the White House was surely a regrettable moment in diplomatic history more akin to reality TV than serious statesmanship. But while US President Donald Trump is widely considered to have blundered in his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, it is imperative for Washington to improve relations with Moscow and end the Ukraine war.
Many people find it unconscionable to negotiate with President Vladimir Putin and give up on Ukraine’s efforts to roll back Russia’s gains and restore its pre-war borders. But this is the cold, hard reality: Russia controls about 20 per cent of Ukraine, which is outmanned and outgunned on the battlefield, and threatens to take even more Ukrainian territory.
Moscow will not tolerate a Western bulwark on its borders, which means Ukraine joining NATO is impossible, and Washington won’t give Kyiv a security guarantee. US support for the Ukraine mission has plummeted with the coming of the Trump adminis­tration.
Understanding this brutal fact of life eludes Zelensky and European leaders, who have virtually no leverage with Washington.

Naturally the reptiles followed up with a snap of the man the swishing Switzer is keen to sell out to ... Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a summit in Astana.

The swishing Switzer managed a single line of performative tut-tutting and cluck-clucking, but the gormless Chamberlain fix was in ...

Trump’s proposal to end a war that Ukraine and the West cannot win is far from ideal: it would mean Russian annexation of at least four oblasts plus Crimea and no NATO membership for Ukraine.
But it’s in Kyiv’s best interests because it’s the least-bad solution to a problem of catastrophic proportions. The alternative is to prolong the war, which would cause only more deaths and destruction, and lead to Ukraine losing even more territory to Russia.
According to the hawks – from left to right, Canberra to Canada and London to Lithuania – Trump’s bilateral overtures to Putin amount to another Munich, the purported 1938 peace agreement that fuelled Nazi expansionism and led to World War II.

The pond never thought of itself as a hawk, but then the pond has never thought that a contemptible sell-out to the likes of Vlad the Sociopath, Stalin, or Mao, had been part of the reptile tradition.

Silly, foolish pond, that was yesterday, and the quislings are rushing to buy heaps of peace in our time snake oil from the mango Mussolini, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has met with US President Donald Trump at the White House in a bilateral meeting, discussing the mineral deal and potential peace talks with Russia.  The pair clashed over peace negotiations with Russia, as the US President accused his Ukrainian counterpart of being disrespectful.

The swishing Switzer turned back the clock to draw out a line of appeasers and fawning supplicants ...as a back-up to his own kissing of the ring and obeisance to unseemly power ...

Never mind that Republican presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan sought accommodation with a powerful Soviet Union a few years after it invaded Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979, respectively. Were these hard-nosed Cold Warriors appeasers?
Never mind, too, that today’s Russia lacks the economic and military capacity to conquer countries to its west and draw a new iron curtain across Europe.
Not so long ago, Western hawks declared that Moscow was losing the war and was on the verge of disintegration. Putin’s fall was only a matter of time. Yet the same people now warn of the Russian army galloping across Eastern and Central Europe. Both positions can’t be correct.
But one thing is clear: Russia, like any great power, will protect its near abroad and will mightily resist any encroachment on its borders that it sees as an existential threat. Of course, this is why Moscow is determined to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

By golly, he'll be just the man to write a piece explaining how Xi is entitled to a piece of Taiwan, and perhaps a piece of anything else he likes ...

The reptiles interrupted to drop a snap of two arch appeasers ... Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan

Back to the swishing Switzer playing craven dove ...

There is another reason for Washington to settle this deadly conflict: the war – and the policy of NATO expansion that precipitated the West’s deteriorating relations with Moscow – has helped create a close strategic relationship between Russia and its old rival China, while making it difficult for the US to pivot fully to Asia to contain China, its principal geopolitical rival. Neither of these developments serve US or, for that matter, Australian interests.
Russia will play hardball to protect its vital interests on its borders, but it’s not the Soviet Union. China, on the other hand, is much more powerful and dangerous. It is bent on challenging US military power in the Asia-Pacific and dominating that region if it can. As a result, China will continue to intimidate and harass long-time US allies, such as Japan, Taiwan, The Philippines and Australia.
Western hawks still talk as if we live in the unipolar moment that existed after the Cold War, where the US could have a large military footprint in every region of the world. But the coming of multipolarity has changed all that and Washington must prioritise its commitments.
Many politicians and pundits don’t seem to understand that the global balance of power has changed profoundly in recent years and Washington must carefully relate ends and means in this new world.
After all, America is overstretched and there are limits to even US power, especially when Washington spends more servicing its debt than on defence.
The Pax Americana is gone, not only because of the re-emergence of old-style power politics in multipolarity but also because of the many foolish policies that the hawks themselves advocated during unipolarity. Think of the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which violated the so-called rules-based international order, cost the US dearly in credibility, blood and treasure, and helped fuel Trump’s America First movement.

The reptiles interrupted again, this time with an AV distraction featuring a toad following the Switzer Chamberlain line ... Sky News contributor Gary Hardgrave says Donald Trump “exposed” Volodymyr Zelensky was “chasing the money” in their Oval Office meeting. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has confirmed he is ready to sign a minerals deal with the United States. This follows his heated exchange with US President Donald Trump at the White House, which unfolded in front of the media. “I think what Donald Trump did on the weekend actually exposed the fact that Zelensky was chasing the loot, chasing the money,” Mr Hardgrave told Sky News host Rita Panahi. “I don’t know whether he’s got much dignity left out of it.”

Actually, Zelensky was chasing military hardware, and was attempting to hold on to the concept of Ukraine as a sovereign state. 

For those wondering about Gazza, here's him chasing the loot, the money, in a consultant way, having been booted from his gig representing toads back in 2007 ...

Sky Noise down under routinely scapes the bottom of the barrel for its talking heads, but then it must be a dubious pleasure to be on screen with unlovely Rita, meter maid ...

And so to the final sell-out gobbet from our own Lord Haw-Haw ...

Today’s Republican Party is no longer the party of George W. Bush and the neo-con hawks but it is populated with China hawks who believe it’s imperative for the US to reorder its strategic priorities away from Europe and focus on containing the only great power capable of overturning the order in a geopolitically significant region. Remaining deeply engaged in the Ukraine war – even if US troops are not directly involved – only hinders US efforts to deter China.
All this is a reminder that the US and its allies should have supported the peace talks in Istanbul between Russia and Ukraine in March-April 2022. They stood a significant chance of succeeding, which would have ended the war quickly and prevented the US from getting bogged down in Ukraine.
But Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Brussels undermined those negotiations, encouraging Kyiv to keep fighting because the West would support Ukraine “as long as it takes”. The West, as political scientist John Mearsheimer warned at the time, has led Ukraine down the primrose path.
Whether Washington is successful in reaching a meaningful peace deal in Ukraine remains to be seen. But Trump’s goal to end the war and stop the slaughter on the battlefield makes strategic and moral sense.
Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney.

Ah, a "meaningful peace deal", a piece of this territory, and a piece of that territory, all produced by faith, loyalty and trust in the marvels emanating from the mind of the mango Mussolini ...

The pond had the feeling that the world had been there before, with that fabulous Stalin-Adolf treaty, and that fabulous appeaser ...

Go on Nev, hand that scrap of paper to the swishing Switzer, he'll need it for his piece on Taiwan ...

Luckily there was an immortal Rowe to help celebrate that blather about a "meaningful peace deal", which for once didn't involve Vlad the Sociopath scoring a piece of this and a piece of that ...

As always, it was in the detail, especially the portrait of the faux Yale hillbilly ...

Me... oow indeed, and what a pity that they're not eating the cats and the dogs ...

And so to a final reptile folly.

Things are tough in the United States for minorities and DEI at the moment.

Parker Molloy noted one set of victims, given both siderist treatment by the contemptible New York Times. (Yes, the pond cancelled them a long time ago, and now WaPo has joined them)

Molloy gave the rag a good biffing in "Not Exactly Consequential": NYT Dismisses Trump's War on Trans Americans, After years of trans panic coverage, the paper now claims attacks on trans rights barely matter.

This was the opening that set the scene for the Molloy ravaging that followed ...

Over the weekend, The New York Times published what might be one of the most callous editorial exercises I've seen in a while. In a piece titled "10 Columnists and Writers Rate What Mattered in Trump’s First Full Month", the paper asked writers to rank Trump's first-month actions on a graph. The vertical axis measured importance (more or less important), while the horizontal axis measured impact (negative or positive).
The premise is simple enough: The Times acknowledges that Trump has been moving at breakneck speed, making it "hard for Americans to keep up with his actions" because "they are coming so fast and on so many fronts." Fair enough. But rather than doing what journalists are supposed to do — prioritize, analyze, explain — they've decided to turn human suffering into an exercise in charting.

It's the kind of both-sides framing that has come to define the Times' approach to covering politics. But there's something particularly grotesque about turning the dismantling of civil rights and democratic institutions into a graphics exercise that looks like it belongs in a corporate strategy meeting.

Fully grotesque and bizarre to boot, but that was just the entrée to another hapless lizard Oz columnist doing a bit of FAFO ...

Fair wages for all a hard sell as Trump declares war on woke, There are plenty of numbers in the report on the gender pay gap, but will the message get through the anti-DEI rhetoric?

The pond will let the reference to 'woke' pass, because the tinkling Helen Trinca is in a state of snowflake suffering ...together with Mary Wooldridge, chief executive of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Here's the thing, tinkling Trinca.

You seem to have a pathetically incomplete awareness of all that News Corp and Faux Noise have done to help kill off DEI, especially the bits about equity and inclusion that relate to women in the workforce.

Heck, the old goat himself decided he'd carve his daughters out of his empire. 

Admittedly that was an equal opportunity action in that he also included James, but all the same it says a lot about his empire's mindset ... (and don't get the empire started on minorities of all kinds and shades).

The release of data showing ­almost three-quarters of Australian companies pay their female employees less than their male colleagues is about “naming and shaming” the boss to do the right thing by women in the workplace.
What gets measured gets done, as they say, and some CEOs and HR chiefs will duck for cover on Tuesday as employees click online to check how big the gender pay gap is in their company – and how it compares to the ­national figure of 12.1 per cent.
But the report from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency covering the pay of 5.3 million workers is at risk of being ignored this year thanks to the Trump-led backlash against the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies that underpin this annual exercise.
The US President’s rubbishing of DEI has gained strong traction in the past few weeks and while he seems more worried about positive treatment of black and brown people, women have not escaped this campaign against corporate equity policies.

You know, the pond would usually line up to rage at the mango Mussolini and his treatment of minorities, but if you were a FAFO woman, and voted for him, only to find out belatedly that he was serious about Project 2025 and the creation of a white nationalist state, then more fool you ... and that goes double for foolish women of the tinkling Trinca kind, attempting to squawk about the suffering of women while working inside the Murdochian tent.

No amount of AV distractions will distract the pond from that central folly ...

Daschle Group President and COO Nathan Daschle has commented on how corporate America’s landscape has transformed since 2016 when Donald Trump first took office to his second term in the top job. Mr Daschle’s remarks come following reports that Google is dropping its diversity target, joining a growing list of corporate American companies that are ditching or scaling back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. President Trump’s election win in 2024, alongside a 2023 US Supreme Court decision outlawing affirmative action in college admission, has led to many major companies ditching DEI initiatives in the states. “Corporations in the United States; there is a market difference between 2016 and 2024. In 2016, people didn’t know what to make of Donald Trump and corporations by and large ran in the other direction,” Mr Daschle told Sky News Australia. “But in 2024, they are racing to embrace him.”

Go on tinkling Trinca, do a swishing Switzer, rush to embrace the mango Mussolini, and the Murdochian empire ...

It's not as if there hadn't been early signs, like stacking the Supreme Court to produce a result that pleased the serial sex abuser and rampant misogynist ...

... and yet the tinkling Trinca seemed mystified by it all ...

Suddenly it dawns on her, suddenly it looms up out of the horizon ...

Suddenly it’s not necessarily a good idea to spruik your efforts to recruit more women or give them pay rises. Suddenly reports like this can be weaponised by critics as unwanted government intervention in the way a company runs its business.
Even before Trump, some critics have argued the WGEA report is of limited value given that for more than 50 years it’s been illegal to pay women less than men for equal work, happily ignoring that this report is more about composition of the workforce.
For others, the pay gap is real, but simply reflects the self-selection by women who don’t like maths or don’t want to work long hours in big jobs because they want to get home to their kids.
Maybe, but whatever way you cut the numbers – and the WGEA cuts and splices them to an often confusing degree – it’s undeniable that there’s an identifiable gap between the remuneration of Australian men and women at a time when there are no legal barriers against anyone doing any job.
Given that, on average, a woman takes home $28,425 a year less than a man, it’s worth looking beyond personal choices at the structural barriers or biases that underpin that difference. It’s worth having a crack at narrowing the gap and the WGEA exercise is just one lever that governments and advocates use to push for change.
The numbers tell a story and for some companies it’s not a good one – although overall they show an improvement, albeit incremental.
Whether this level of data is effective in getting companies to review their internal processes, and whether it’s worth the complex collection and analysis involved, are questions likely to be asked more openly as Trump tries to dewoke the world.
The data is useful for HR staff in companies that are keen to benchmark themselves against their rivals, but it’s not a silver bullet for action. One problem is which figures give a true picture of what’s going on.
As WGEA CEO Mary Wooldridge says: “You could imagine the hours of debate we’ve had about which numbers to use and what’s the best representation.”
It was always going to be hard to compare last year and this year because of the inclusion this year of remuneration of CEOs and other top executives.
This allows for an average figure (21.8 per cent) based on employees to sit alongside the median figures that were highlighted last year.
But there’s plenty of room for confusion in a report which also serves up another figure of 12.1 per cent as a way of expressing the gap. That’s the midpoint of average total remuneration using the pay gaps in individual companies as the reference point.
So take your pick when you’re making the argument for or against the need for action on pay.

Take your both siderist pick, or pick your march and your memories, this being the headline in the sell-out LA Times way back in 2017 ...Trump loathing unifies the diverse crowd at the massive L.A. women’s march.

There was a cartoon to go with that ...

Here, have another couple as a reminder of action on women's rights ...

Faux Noise doesn't care either, do U?

Suddenly the tinkling Trinca has discovered the threat? It must be a vast relief and a comfort to spend all your time in the reptile hive mind ...

There’s also the problem that the data, which is for the 12 months to March 2024, lags the public naming of individual companies, which only began in last year’s report.
We will have to wait for next year to see if the “naming and shaming” approach forces companies to lift their game. Wooldridge is well aware of the Trump effect but says feedback from ­employers is that they have ­embedded policies in their businesses and will continue to report.
“Perhaps there’s a bit of a message that (they) mightn’t be so vocal in (their) advocacy but that’s not necessarily going to change what (they) do within the workplace,” she says. “But I suspect there may be some softening in terms of the communications, or the external publicity.”
The question, as DEI is questioned, is not so much whether a future government would seek to change the rules – the Coalition backed the WGEA and welcomed the report on Monday – but that companies may stop reporting, given there’s no real punishment for not complying.
(The WGEA can publish names of ­errant companies and they may not be eligible to tender for government contracts or some government assistance.) There’s more uncertainty about new legislation, stuck in the Senate, which would require companies to set targets for reducing the gap – and about which the Coalition has ­expressed concern.
Tuesday’s report does not offer a simple picture of pay, but as we head to International Women’s Day on March 8, it’s also clear that while we’ve come a long way since equal pay was granted in 1969, there’s still work to be done if we want that truly gender-balanced workforce.

Ah, the old "much has been done, much remains to be done" routine.

It's a safe bet that much will remain to be done if you want any form of DEI... or any kind of fairness in the workforce ...

Currently the United States is a long way from doing much of anything, except endure another Texas Chainsaw Massacre ... as evoked by Tom Tomorrow ... just try to hold on to that copper wire if you can ...