In the spirit of the rapidly closing Xmas season, the pond offers up a craven Craven, the Bjorn-again one and sociopathic Russian cheer ...

 

With the twelve days of Xmas almost done - as a reformed tyke, the pond takes the traditional view that the 5th January, Epiphany Eve or as Shakspere would have it, twelfth night, is the end of it all - looking back the pond was pleased to see how free of religious crankery, the war on Xmas, etc etc, that the reptiles managed to be, and so the pond.

The reptiles, and so the pond, meant no harm in not celebrating the Feast of Circumcision day, but in the usual way, of course the pond had basked in its freedom from Xmas, and had scribbled, in an optimistic, delusional way far too soon. 

There had to be at least one full on domestic Xmas war atop the digital edition ...

Dammit, election mode at the very beginning of January? Couldn't the reptiles wait until after 26th January?

And there had to be at least one pious Xmas bore, some professional Xmas nutter riddled with hectoring, lecturing piety ... scan the extreme far right of the digital Oz and you'll come upon him, and lo, the first shall be last, and the last shall be first ...

What a relief, a craven Craven outburst and that meant that the pond didn't have to spend time with garrulous Gemma wilfully ignoring a genocide ...

The craven Craven was in full indignant spleen, and all the pond had to do was watch ...

Truth that transcends a materialist world, We compete to give the most expensive presents, resent others for not reciprocating, then gorge ourselves stupid on the day. A week later, we drink enough alcohol to inebriate Godzilla. Is this all Christmas is about now?

Who to blame? Those bloody English tourists, who littered Manly yesterday, as a shark patrolled the beach thirsting for their blood (there were also bluebottles, but the dragons were cute and out and about). 

Apparently they weren't just at Manly or Bondi. Bronte also felt the wrath of the tourist invasion, How the ‘festive’ season looked at Bronte Beach on the morning after Christmas, 2024. Picture: Flavio Brancaleone

Dammit, it wasn't just the tourist locust plague?There were local boofheads too?

That was enough to set the Craven off, and yes, the pond will say it again, all the pond had to do was sit back and watch.

Christmas and New Year’s are now safely past. The casualties have been counted and the implausible excuses workshopped. With just a touch of hindsight available, now is the time to ponder what on earth was going on.

Every festive season you can guarantee a certain number of depressing articles bemoaning the loss of the real meaning of Christmas and the excesses of December 31. This is one of those articles.

At least it is not at the thundering end of the spectrum. I am not threatening eternal damnation to those whose idea of a Christmas card is Visa or Mastercard plastic. Although a warning whiff of sulphur might be salutary.

This extended complaint is more sad than fulminatory. It’s just that I wonder where the transcendent meaning of Christmas – and what management consultants would call its net positives – has gone. The whole Christmas-New Year’s experience is now packaged under a brand name, The Festive Season.

What on earth does festive mean? It is not a word in common use. We do not have festive football premierships or – God help us – festive elections. The word comes from festival, which means some great celebration. It is first cousin to the idea of a feast, but not just any ceremonial tuck-in. Our notion of a celebratory December is inextricably linked to one of the great Christian feast days, the nativity of Jesus.

It wouldn't be a proper Xmas rant in the Catholic Boys' Daily without a snap of the main man, Pope Francis greets the crowd from the main balcony of St. Peter's basilica after the Urbi et Orbi message and blessing to the city and the world as part of Christmas celebrations on December 25. Picture: AFP

Then it was on with the ranting ...

Not that you would easily pick that up in these fallen days. Wandering about any of our capital cities over the past few weeks, you would think it was an extended industrial show for makers of tinsel and anatomically challenged plastic snowmen.

I do not want to be marked out as a religious crank – there is a long queue to do that already – but I admit to playing a sick little game every Christmas season. As I wander along the local shopping strip, which is saturated in festive decoration, I try to count the number of shops that show any recognition of the nativity that founded the whole thing.

These days my via dolorosa takes me down Military Road in Mosman. I have been doing it for 16 years now. Around 2008, about half the shops displayed at least some glancing recognition of the actual joy to the world. By 2016, it had fallen to about a quarter. This year, along the whole commercial heart of one of Sydney’s wealthiest suburbs, I spotted one small crib. Good on you, whoever put it up, but I suspect you lost custom.

I know that as an increasingly rare observant Catholic, I cannot expect everyone to buy into the whole reality of the virgin birth, the incarnation, the stable, the angels and the camels (my favourites). Mind you, it might be a sensible each-way investment against enduring the roiling fires of hell in the company of tedious unbelievers such as Tim Minchin and Phillip Adams.

But as a matter of common sense and imaginative intellectual capacity, it might be useful to recognise and celebrate the real values of Christmas, which are accessible to atheists and agnostics, alongside Christians and people of other faiths.

The pond is all for the real values of Xmas, and in that spirit offers up a sampling of Cunk. 

The pond isn't that big on Cunk, but in troubled times a Cunk in time saves nine ...

     

The pond does apologise for the interruption, do Cunk on in a free of Cunk way about the unrepayable gift of the nativity ...

The first is hope. In a thoroughly fallen world, where people are taken hostage, shot and starved every day, Christmas stands as a bonfire of hope. After all, what crazy, intemperate God would send his own son to suffer for and redeem humankind. If he is that maniacally generous, perhaps there is some modicum of hope for us all.

Even to dedicated God-deniers, that idea that hope is unquenchable whether by torture, starvation or persecution must have some resonance.

But the less commonly remarked virtue of Christmas is its gift of reflection. In the face of the vast, unrepayable gift of the nativity, what have we done to reciprocate? Are we so very certain about what nations we revile, what politicians we detest, which family members we forget to invite to Christmas dinner? We cannot even aspire to perfection. But we can at least let it simply illuminate our own grubby lives.

This is not the shallow reflection of the new year, where we set ourselves improbable targets for weight loss or unachievable ambitions for professional promotion, all the while spending like a drunken treasurer. It is when we admit the possibility that there is some badness within us, are sorry about it and at least try to do better.

Divine truth, evocative legend or the world’s most famous fairy story, Bethlehem impels us to this conclusion, regardless of race, religion or politics.

Speaking of fine fairy stories, the pond was deeply moved to see Xians at work, in Newborns are being left in dumpsters in Texas, but Republicans don't seem to care.

Talk about the Xmas spirit in action, but sorry, do keep ranting on ...

The great apologia for modern Christmas is that it is a festival of family. We gather together in our perpetually strained clans, augment them with a few genuinely dear friends and drink ourselves silly while showering each other with bargain sale presents.

There is quite a bit to be said for this. At least it brings the crazy aunt from Quirindi into the fold, even if it is only once a year.

But empathy comes at a price – literally. We compete to provide and receive the most expensive presents, resent others’ limited generosity, strive to put on the best Christmas dinner and gossip about the inebriation of old Bill after everyone has gone home. I know I do. Then on New Year’s Eve we have a repeat performance, but this time with fireworks and enough alcohol to inebriate Godzilla.

Splendid stuff, but we need another banal Xmas season snap to maintain the fury and the rage and the consigning of sinners to an endless eternity of hellfire. 

Come on down, Shoppers in the Pitt Street Mall in the Sydney CBD during the post-Christmas sales. Picture: Gaye Gerard/NewsWire

That did the trick, and sent the craven Craven off into another frenzy ...

The challenge is not merely that Christmas has become commercial, which it certainly has, but that it has become materialist. Not only was there no room in the original inn but there is no room for that translucent story in an orgy of turkey, reasonably decent wine and ear-piercing electronic dev­ices for the kids.

All of which is odd in a nation that ostentatiously pines for the spiritual. Millions genuinely seek or claim to be seeking something beyond the commercial veil. But even this desire struggles in an age of mindless mercantile self-help.

How often have you been regaled by someone waving the latest tome on self-realisation spouting that “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual”. What on earth do they mean? By definition, the notion of spirituality involves believing in something beyond the human world. What is it for these cut-price mystics?

Too often, it is merely rebranded materialism. I believe in human actualisation, as expressed in a perfectly formed body. I demand that the planet be healed according to my personal prescription. I am a mystic raindrop therapist.

But however misdirected or amusing, all these desires go in a single direction: people long for a spiritual reality that transcends mere functional reality.

This is one of the reasons religion is growing, rather than shrinking, as a world phenomenon. In Australia, as old, white, cynical Catholics are deserting the pews, they are being replaced by young, vibrant, committed co-religionists from India and Africa.

More eccentrically, an Australia starved of spirituality has begun to manufacture or appropriate homegrown varieties.

The more extreme versions of climate crisis are obvious examples. The concept of Earth as a sort of incorporeal moral concept is celebrated from the worshippers of Greta Thunberg to nutters who glue themselves to major traffic facilities.

But perhaps the most fascinating example is European Australians who attempt to colonise an entirely genuine

Indigenous spirituality. They adopt and appropriate ancient practices and legends that not only are not theirs but that they would laugh out of any conventional redbrick church.

All of which shows that the desire of humankind for transcendence is ineradicable. It is a pity we cannot see it when it stares at us gently from a crib.

Greg Craven is former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.

Truly most excellent stuff, a splendid rant, and now in the continuing spirt of the season ...

 

Thanks George and so to a bonus from the Bjorn-again one, in the form of Smart and simple steps to a better world in 2025, Why aren’t we making more progress on lifting poverty in the world? In large measure it’s because in trying to focus on everything, we prioritise nothing. A new year offers a fresh opportunity.

...including a fresh opportunity to avoid discussing climate change, and its implications for world health.

The Bjorn-again one's piece opened with a flourish, Giving one multivitamin a day to a mother who is pregnant would mean her children grow up healthier, smarter and more productive. Picture: Glenn Hampson

The pond isn't sure that supplements are the solution. It seems like something of a first world solution.

Wouldn't a healthy diet be better for mother and child? You know, actually arrange for women and children and men in Gaza to be given access to food and medicine, instead of bunging on a genocide?

After all, the matter of supplements seems to be something of a first world issue, Is There Really Any Benefit to Multivitamins?

Half of all American adults—including 70 percent of those age 65 and older—take a multivitamin or another vitamin or mineral supplement regularly. The total price tag exceeds $12 billion per year—money that Johns Hopkins nutrition experts say might be better spent on nutrient-packed foods like fruit, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products.

In an editorial in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine titled “Enough Is Enough: Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements,” Johns Hopkins researchers reviewed evidence about supplements, including three very recent studies:

• An analysis of research involving 450,000 people, which found that multivitamins did not reduce risk for heart disease or cancer.
• A study that tracked the mental functioning and multivitamin use of 5,947 men for 12 years found that multivitamins did not reduce risk for mental declines such as memory loss or slowed-down thinking.
• A study of 1,708 heart attack survivors who took a high-dose multivitamin or placebo for up to 55 months. Rates of later heart attacks, heart surgeries and deaths were similar in the two groups.

Just asking for a friend who pops pills like they were candy, but  do go on ...

Now that we have closed out 2024 and are looking to the new year ahead, we can take the time during the holiday season to reflect on what we’ve achieved and how we can make 2025 better – achieve our goals, give back to our communities and contribute to the betterment of the world.

When we give, there’s no shortage of noble causes, from alleviating poverty and improving education to protecting the environment and advancing healthcare. We should, in theory, all align around shared aspirations to make 2025 a year of progress for all. But the hard truth is that global co-operation has struggled mightily during the past decade.

In 2015, the UN came up with a 169-point agenda to fix all the problems facing humanity by 2030. The so-called Sustainable Development Goals were agreed on by all the world’s leaders with the best of intentions.

Yet, with five years left to reach these goals, the world is wildly off-track on almost all 169 promises. The fight against poverty, disease and hunger has lost momentum.

Why aren’t we making more headway? In large measure it’s because we try to do too much. Trying to focus on everything means we have prioritised nothing and achieved very little.

A new year offers a fresh opportunity. Instead of trying to do it all – as a society but also as individuals with our own giving – we should focus first on the interventions that yield the most progress.

That means those that provide the highest returns on investment for people, the planet and future generations.

Here’s the catch: the best investments aren’t necessarily the ones that grab headlines or attract celebrity endorsements. I’ve worked with more than 100 of the world’s top economists and several Nobel laureates to find which of the many global goals deliver the most return on investment.

Across hundreds of pages of peer-reviewed, free analysis, we have identified the 12 smartest things we could do to make life better for the poorer half of the planet. These solutions are seldom making headlines but they are cheap and incredibly powerful.

Oh dear, whenever a snake oil salesman offers just 12 of the smartest things, you know you're being sold a pup.

Cue a snap ...

An Afghan burqa-clad woman asks for alms along a street in Badakhshan province in Afghanistan in December. Picture: AFP

Do the 12 smartest things include the abolition of barking mad fundamentalist religions, and their intolerance of women? You know, rid the world of fundie Xians, fundie Islamics, fundie Zionists, fundie Hindus, and so on and on, through the thousands of gods invented over the years ...

Of course not ...

When a pregnant mother lacks essential nutrients and vitamins, her child’s growth and brain development will be slower. Her kids will be condemned to doing worse throughout their entire lives.

A mere $US2.31 ($3.72) can ensure that an expectant mother receives a basic multivitamin supplement that means her children will grow up healthier, smarter and more productive.

Every dollar spent on nutritional supplements for pregnant women can yield up to $US38 in economic benefits. This is not a far-off utopia. It’s an actionable, proven solution that could be scaled up immediately.

Another simple but powerful investment is in improving learning. In the poorest countries, only one in 10 10-year-olds can read and write. We need to fix this, not just because it’s the right thing to do but also to reduce future strife and reliance on aid, and to ensure countries can write their own success stories.

Most schools group kids in classes by age, regardless of their ability. Some students struggle while others are bored. The solution is simple but transformative: teach children individually at the right level. Obviously, teachers can’t manage this for every child but technology can. Just one hour a day in front of a tablet with educational software can teach reading, writing and basic math.

Countless studies show that even if the other seven hours of daily schooling remain traditional and ineffective, after one year the student will have learned as much as normally takes three years.

The costs are modest: Sharing a tablet costs about $US31 a student per year. The return on investment is extraordinary; children who learn more become more productive adults, resulting in a return of $US65 for every dollar spent. This is a great long-term investment for a more stable, self-sufficient world.

There is a compelling case to focus on tackling the diseases that have already been wiped out in rich countries, such as malaria and tuberculosis, that have become diseases of poverty. The simple act of providing more anti-mosquito bed-nets and expanded malaria treatment across Africa would save 200,000 lives every year, with benefits worth $US48 for every dollar spent. Healthy, productive individuals are likelier to innovate, work and contribute to the world, ultimately benefiting everyone.

Um, so a tablet will wipe out bigotry, prejudice, hate, fear and loathing? 

Sorry, Bjorn-again one, the tech bros don't seem to have managed to work that magic in the United States ...

Sorry, the pond is feeling a little light headed, it being the seasonal thing ... 

This was the real snap to round out the Bjorn-again one's offering ... Volunteers and homeless people take part in a Christmas solidarity dinner called 'No Families Without Christmas' in front of the National Congress in Buenos Aires on December 24. Picture: AFP

Um, perhaps not the most astute reptile illustration, what with that Aljzeera story, Inflation down, poverty up as Milei takes chainsaw to Argentina's economy.

...To be sure, the belt-tightening that restored order to Argentina’s accounts has come at a steep social cost, triggering a punishing recession, an increase in unemployment and a fall in real wages across both the public and private sectors.

The brunt of the pain has fallen on the working class. Poverty surged to 53 percent in the first half of 2024, up from 40 percent in 2023 – the highest recorded jump in two decades. It has since dipped slightly to 50 percent, although the number of people estimated to be living in extreme poverty remains north of 6 million.

Nearly seven in 10 Argentinian children are growing up poor, up slightly compared with 2023, according to UNICEF. And 1 million boys and girls go to bed every day on an empty stomach.

No wonder there's a need for a solidarity dinner ...

And so to the final gobbet of inspirational snake-oil messaging ...

As we begin 2025, we need to stop chasing grand lists of unachievable goals and focus on what’s working. Our resolution should be to direct whatever resources we have – our time, attention, money or political will – towards the actions that bring about the greatest improvements in people’s lives.

In 2025, my hope for the world is that governments and institutions will finally stop dithering and focus on solutions that deliver the best returns. By concentrating on what works, we could achieve more in one year than we did in a decade of dithering.

As individuals, we can do our own small part to make 2025 the year we resolve to get serious about progress for all.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is Best Things First.

What a splendid way for the world's greatest climate scientist to avoid talking about climate science and global warming ...

And so to a closing video offering, as bizarre as it is comical, surreal, sinister and desperate, a bit like a mix of Don Lane with Bert Newton.

It provides startling evidence that Vlad the impaler's state media folk are desperate to be Americans, right down to a threatening reference to a Tarantino film. 

As for the glitz and the kitsch, it almost out does America ... but pace the craven Craven, it's the spirit of the soon to close season ...

 

And here's another offering in the spirit of the Ruski season, and never mind the sociopathic Vlad the imapler taking out Ukraine ... why not take out Santa too ...

In which the pond does its Friday Henry duty ...

 

It was inevitable what would dominate the reptile headlines this day, though amazingly last night ABC News 24 in its 6pm bulletin managed to ignore the obvious symbolism of a Musk truck exploding outside a Trump tower - switching to SBS solved that problem, though that solution might disappear under the mutton Dutton.

Never mind, each day the ABC is the pond's despair, almost as much despair as the reptiles produce on a daily basis.

ISIS might exploit Palestine anger to fuel terror is somehow a reptile EXCLUSIVE? 

Only in the hive mind could a reptile imagine that the bleeding obvious deserves an EXCLUSIVE tag.

Cue recent Haaretz headlines ...

'We're Still Breathing, and We Don't Want to Die': Testimonies From the Inferno in Northern Gaza, The IDF is completing its expulsion of Palestinians from northern Gaza – an area that once housed a population the size of Tel Aviv's. Residents who fled describe an unprecedented, brutal operation

Israeli Army Pushing Gazans Southward, Prohibiting Them From Taking Belongings, IDF soldiers even force residents to leave their clothes behind, despite humanitarian organizations' warning of dangerously cold temperatures. 

And cue this from the Haaretz daily email:

• According to the IDF, Hamas' internal security apparatus, which Shahwan led, "carried out violent interrogations against Gazans, severely violated human rights and repressed the group's opposition."
• Medics in Gaza told Reuters that the Israeli strike in Al-Mawasi killed at least 10 Palestinians, including women and children, and wounded 15. The IDF has not yet commented.
• The Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza said that at least 45,581 Palestinians have been killed and 108,438 wounded since the start of the war.
• "Just two weeks ago, another Haaretz investigation revealed the arbitrariness and banality with which Gazans are killed in the Netzarim corridor and how every dead Palestinian is counted as a terrorist. Quite a few incidents described in that report happened after Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach took control of the corridor. But other accounts from soldiers reveal that the brigade's lack of discipline and the way it operates under an alternative set of laws went beyond that, with additional consequences. In early December, Vach convened the division's top officers for a review of their four months of combat in the Netzarim corridor. 'We didn't achieve our goal,' he said at the start of his remarks, according to officers who attended. The goal, they said, was to forcibly displace some 250,000 Palestinian residents who are still living in northern Gaza. In fact, only a few hundred Palestinians crossed the Netzarim corridor into southern Gaza" – Yaniv Kubovich

And so on and on ...

There are all kinds of terrorism unfolding on a daily basis, some the reptiles care about, some the reptiles studiously ignore.

Down at the very bottom of this day's digital offerings, the reptiles tried to maintain their climate and religious rage with a flurry of meretricious EXCLUSIVES ...

The reptiles are very easily trolled, with this a classic troll ...

Really?

Is it so shocking to Jimbo and reptile sensibility to note that the liar from the Shire, allegedly an Xian, is hanging around with a sexual predator, a pussy-grabbing prevert, convicted of sexual assault?

On second thoughts, quite possibly Jimbo and the reptiles are on board with some kinds of sexual abuse ... provided they're done by their hero, King Donald I, the tangerine tyrant.

The reptile EXCLUSIVE rage about climate news did provide the pond with an excuse to note Garry Linnell in The Echnida. 

Though The Canberra Times' emails are currently on a limited holyday service (Mondays and Fridays), it's safe to say you won't read any of this sort of stuff in the lizard Oz ...

...Oscar Wilde once snarled that conversation about the weather was the last resort of the unimaginative. These days it's the preferred subject for the curious and those needing a sense of control over chaos. A recent study found one in two smartphone users regularly consult weather apps, while the industry built around this growing obsession will reap revenues of close to $2 billion this year.
Last month Google announced that its DeepMind artificial intelligence program had made an astonishing leap forward in the business of predicting the future. Its algorithms can now churn through data in a microsecond, interpreting cloud patterns and listening to the whispering of the wind to achieve unmatched and highly accurate 15-day forecasts.
Fifteen days. It's a bold promise, almost godlike in its scope; a development that combines the two most pressing issues destined to radically alter human life for generations to come - climate change and the rapidly evolving industry of AI.
Fifteen days. How remarkable. Farmers once gave the Bureau of Meteorology a standing ovation when it got it right over the weekend. Weather app addicts like me are rejoicing. But it's not enough. While we celebrate the micro we choose to ignore the macro. Fifteen days tells us whether we'll need an umbrella in a fortnight. It doesn't predict the storm gathering on the horizon that will lay siege to our place in the world in the coming decades.
The year 2023 was the planet's hottest in more than 170 years of forensic bookkeeping. It was also, just as disturbingly, 0.15 of a degree warmer than 2016 - the previous title holder for the hottest year. Once the data is finalised, it is expected 2024 will eclipse all records, a pattern expected to worsen in the coming decade. "The last two years have been kind of supercharged," noted the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt, recently.
We've all sensed the longer summers, shorter winters and the increasing violence of storms. The 10 hottest years on record all occurred in the past decade. Recent data suggests climate change caused 41 additional days of dangerous heat in the world last year, while intensifying 26 out of 29 major weather events that caused thousands of deaths and displaced millions of people.

Say what? The pond is only informed by the reptile hive mind. What is this bizarre talk of a climate crisis? Please, do go on ...

Australia, parched and dehydrated for hundreds of thousands of years, is now 1.5 degrees warmer on average than a century ago. This sort of catastrophic shift should chill the warmest marrow in our bones. But we continue sleepwalking into the future. I ask if it will rain in 15 days. I don't want to ask if my granddaughter will be able to breathe the air in 50 years.
Like so many others I've become so impressed by our audacity at predicting the unpredictable that I forget those forecasts on my touchscreen are little more than a short-term gimmick. The future won't present itself to us with cute little icons representing recent precipitation levels and wind speeds. The only accurate forecast is that it will be much wilder and messier, wracked by longer droughts and apocalyptic blazes as the ice caps melt and sea levels rise.
But even now, decades after the first alarm bells sounded, we don't want to talk about it. I experienced a month in the Arctic last year, hiking across shrinking glaciers and increasingly exposed tundra. When I returned I passionately preached to friends and colleagues about the dangers ahead. And each time their eyes glazed over a little more.
So now I immerse myself in weather apps and pathetically celebrate 15-day forecasts. A marvel, perhaps. But they will never be enough. The future isn't something we can predict or control. The future is something we shape with every choice we make. And it's clear we've decided we're not brave enough to make those hard choices required to save it.

Well yes, "sleepwalking" is just the right somnambulistic condition required for reading the lizard Oz. Eyes wide shut and fully glazed is what happens when you read the reptiles ...

But setting genuine terror aside, the pond knew its Friday duty.

A quick survey of the far right extremities of the digital rag confirmed what had to be done...

Forget Charles  "each way" Wooley, woolly by name and by nature, and Rodger sounding the alarums. 

No need to wander off with them, at least not when we have our Henry and one of his spectacular history lessons, usually sublimely irrelevant, but always sublime in their own bizarre, deeply weird way ...

There are all kinds of terrorism unfolding on a daily basis, some our Henry cares about, some our Henry studiously ignores.

Return of Islamist terror a test for our lax laws, With the tenth anniversary of the attack on Charlie Hebdo approaching – and the US now reeling from the New Orleans terror attack – there can be no complacency in the face of Islamist rhetoric.

Why go back to Hebdo? Partly for a snap...

Protesters hold copies of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo during an anti-terrorism vigil at Place de La Republique for the murdered school teacher Samuel Paty.

Perhaps it might have been better for the reptiles to go full on, rather than discretely show that image being held up ...

Okay, that gives the pond its fundamentalist-deploring credentials, essential before proceeding and absorbing our Henry's history lesson ...

A few days before Christmas, a French court condemned Brahim Chnina and Abdelhakim Sefrioui to 13 and 15 years’ imprisonment respectively for their role in the murder five years ago of Samuel Paty.
Coming on the tenth anniversary of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, and with the US reeling after the terrorist attack in New Orleans, the court’s decision highlights the dangers of complacency in the face of Islamist rhetoric.
Paty, a secondary school teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northeast of Paris, had, as required by the national curriculum, taught a session on freedom of expression using the attack on Charlie Hebdo to highlight what was at stake.

Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the prophet Mohammed were on the Ministry of Education’s website for teachers to use in their presentations. But before projecting the cartoons, Paty warned his class that some students might find them shocking. He therefore invited any students who feared being offended to leave the class while they were being shown and then return for the general discussion.

At this point the reptiles tried to remind our Henry that there's been a lot of terrorism under the Gaza bridge since then with an AV offering designed to spread FUD and alarums about Australia missing out on its fair share of attacks by terrorists ...

Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister Patrick Gorman discusses the domestic implications of the New Orleans truck attack which claimed the lives of at least 15 people and injured dozens of others. This comes after the FBI is treating the incident as a possible terrorist attack. “Our terrorism alert level is probable that is not where you would ever want it to be,” Mr Gorman said. “We’ll continue to do everything we can, as an Australian government, to keep Australians safe at home … but we all have a role to play.”

Our Henry managed to ignore that attempt to spread FUD about Australia and pressed on with his history lesson ...

The discussion itself proceeded uneventfully. However, that evening, Chnina’s daughter told her father that Paty had asked Muslim students to identify themselves and leave the room, giving him free rein to launch into a tirade against Islam. Paty had, of course, done no such thing. Moreover, it emerged that the girl, who had a long record of truancy, had not even attended class. But that didn’t stop Chnina from decrying on social media what he described as an Islamophobic attack on his daughter.
Chnina’s posts were soon drawn to the attention of Sefrioui, who has run a series of “anti-Islamophobia” organisations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Drawing on some of France’s leading mosques to publicise Chnina’s concocted claims, Sefrioui mounted a vitriolic campaign denouncing Paty, in posts downloaded more than 100,000 times, as an Islamophobe who had ridiculed the prophet Mohammed.
One of the people viewing Sefrioui’s videos was Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Chechen Muslim refugee. Having purchased butcher’s knives, Anzorov repeatedly stabbed Paty as he was leaving school, before decapitating him with a meat cleaver.
Anzorov, who immediately posted a video of the beheading, died in a confrontation with police. What matters here, and deserves more attention than it has received, is the court’s careful reasoning in its verdict against Sefrioui.
While Sefrioui’s attacks on Paty were venomous, he was consistently cautious in what he posted. Having been involved in previous controversies, he appears to have sought legal advice about exactly how far he could go before being accused of incitement to violence.
As a result, Sefrioui never called for Paty to be assaulted, much less murdered; exemplifying Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dictum that the “bad man walks the line”, he clearly tried to benefit from the constitutional protection of freedom of expression by stopping short of explicitly urging violence.

It's easy, and fair game, even if sublimely irrelevant to the current events that set our Henry in motion.

At this point, it's a ritual to note that the pond has no truck with fundamentalists of any kind or stripe, and frequently wonders why it pays such attention to fundamentalist reptiles, either fanatically religious (the bromancer), fanatically climate science denying (the bromancer), or both (the bromancer).

Never mind, have a snap, Emmanuel Macron pays his respects at the coffin of Samuel Paty inside the Sorbonne courtyard in October 2020.

Back to our Henry doing his Michel Houellebecq impression ...

It is, however, equally clear that his posts, which urged Muslims to fulfil their duty to punish blasphemers, were addressed to an audience that included violent extremists, who would interpret them as a call to arms. As the court argued, the question, in these situations, is not what a reasonable person would make of the posts’ literal content; it is whether there was a material and reasonably foreseeable probability that they would result in violence.
The issue that raises is not a new one. On the contrary, it featured prominently, as “the Mark Antony question”, in the debates that framed the classic American jurisprudence on the limits of freedom of expression. The reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is scarcely accidental: no work in the English language is more squarely focused on “the power of speech/To stir men’s blood”.

Normally the pond wouldn't interrupt our Henry in full flight, but that mention of Shakspere sent our Henry into a kind of post-Thucydides, ecstatic trance ...

Some might wonder what this has to do with wretched mass murder in the streets of New Orleans, or a Musk truck exploding, but they must be newbies to the company of the hole in bucket man ...

Between 1581 and 1602, London had been rocked by 35 outbreaks of widespread disorder, more often than not induced by firebrands. However, Shakespeare’s concern was not just with fiery calls to mayhem: it was also with the ability of orators to induce violence, despite pretending not to.
Never has that ability been as starkly displayed as it is in Mark Antony’s speech over Caesar’s dead body. In a text of dazzling brilliance – the speech, which is barely 1100 words long, deploys fully 52 of the 90 major elements of classical rhetoric, including those associated with “oratio obliqua” – Mark Antony “lets slip the dogs of war”, while repeatedly proclaiming Brutus an “honourable man”.
Stirred by the speech to cry “Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!/Let not a traitor live!”, the mob runs riot in the streets, murdering a harmless poet because he has the same name as one of Caesar’s assassins. Meanwhile, Mark Antony, admiring his handiwork, says coldly to himself, “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot”.
It was with Mark Antony’s oration in mind that the US Supreme Court rejected Judge Learned Hand’s finding, in Masses Publishing Co. v Patten (1917), that speech only breached the prohibition on incitement if it involved “direct advocacy” of illegal action. However, the Supreme Court’s own “clear and present danger” test raised more questions than it answered.
In Dennis (1950), Learned Hand, by then chief judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, therefore tried to give the test some precision, writing that the courts “must ask whether the gravity of the ‘evil’ ” that could be caused by the speech, “discounted by its improbability (of occurrence)”, justifies its condemnation.

Dammit, he's a veritable book of quotations, interrupted only by a snap People gather on Place de la Republique in homage to history teacher Samuel Paty.

How many gather to pay homage to the many thousands dead in Gaza and the West Bank?

Never mind, that image seemed to send Henry into a freedom of expression frenzy...

What the French court has done is to adapt and apply that test to the age of online Islamic extremism. It accepted that Chnina and Sefrioui neither specifically advocated violence nor conspired with Anzorov in carrying it out. But given how predictable it was that their campaign would induce violence, it concluded that they were, legally and materially, Anzorov’s associates in his terrorist act.
Unfortunately, the Australian laws on incitement fall well short of that level of intellectual sophistication. We seem to struggle with the idea that the law must erect, and effectively enforce, a wall of separation between advocacy, which it protects, and inciting, overtly or covertly, the violence that makes societies unlivable.
Far from preserving the freedom of expression, ignoring that requirement only empowers freedom’s worst enemies, while every act of terrorism weakens its friends. A free society cannot survive if its citizens come to believe that the price of freedom is perpetual fear.

Hang on, hang on, surely the entire point of the reptile business model is perpetual fear?

Would that it were not so, but each day hate mongers fill the digital edition pages.

Each day women must still live in fear of Catholic-inspired terrorism, the latest examples emanating from Queensland and South Australia.

It is no trivial matter that Australian papists can, together with Islamic fundamentalists - and with complete impunity - propose legislation to strip women of the control of their bodies.

Oh sorry, the pond always gets its history lessons wrong, and so must attend to our Henry's final words in his history lecture for the day.

It is therefore no trivial matter that Australian imams can, with complete impunity, refer to Jews as “pigs, rats and termites”. Nor is it a trivial matter that the government, having stoked a climate in which unreason festers, disowns, like Mark Antony, any responsibility for the foreseeable consequences.
“Poetry,” said WH Auden, “makes nothing happen.” But rhetoric, history shows, makes things happen, on a frightening scale. And as Michel de Montaigne put it, in his essay “Of the Vanitie of Words” that scholars believe influenced Shakespeare, the harm it wreaks is at its greatest “when the commonwealths affaires are in worst estate, and the devouring Tempest of civill broyles most agitates and turmoiles them”.
As 2025 opens with our own commonwealth’s affairs “in worst estate”, that is a warning we can no longer afford to ignore.

But what of the terrorism on view in Gaza and the West Bank? 

What of former PMs hanging around with convicted sexual predators?

What, for that matter, of the sources of domestic terrorism at home?

Sorry, you can't expect the reptiles to pay attention to Catholic fundamentalists; they are, after all, the home of Catholic fundamentalism.

And with that, it's time to return to the US for a few Luckovichs, as a way of wrapping up the day with a few insights into a deeply troubled country discovering what that talk of chickens coming home to roost means ...

In which the pond indulges visionary Ted, before spending time with Lionel ...

 

The pond simply had to leave the current US civil war alone for awhile, and not even the news that the liar from the Shire had found his natural home could sway the pond ...

But with that determination came slim pickings ...

The pond plunged past Jack the Insider in reptile election campaign mode. There had to be something better ...

Usually the pond ignores the politicians who parade in the lizard Oz, but this is the silly season, and Ted is a visionary, and there was no way the pond could ignore his vision, outlined in an alarmingly short - 3 minutes so the reptiles insist - visionary tract entitled Labor betting our economy on green energy pipedream, What Jim Chalmers doesn’t understand is that, by itself, a bigger electricity system only guarantees higher costs and a greater environmental burden.

A few might quibble at the great dreaming, the splendid vision, such as Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Treasurer Jim Chalmers at Ampol Oil refinery at Lytton. Picture: Lachie Millard

But Ted himself is very high energy about his vision of a low energy future ... with a transformed pond deciding to throw away its big telly and revert to a humble 23" model ...

Labor has launched its most bizarre argument yet against the Coalition’s energy plan, claiming its own higher energy costs are good for economic growth.
Reframing the energy debate to be about economic growth is crazy brave for a government overseeing Australia’s slowest economic growth in 30 years, outside the pandemic.
But it’s also fundamentally flawed. It makes no economic sense to assume an economy is better off if it’s forced to consume more electricity, especially at an extraordinary cost for households and businesses to switch away from other energy sources. But more on this in a moment.
A few weeks ago, independent analysis by Frontier Economics showed the Coalition’s plan for a balanced energy mix of renewables, nuclear and gas to be $263bn, or 44 per cent, cheaper than Labor’s renewables-only scheme. In triggering Labor’s latest attack, Treasurer Jim Chalmers didn’t take aim at Frontier’s modelling.
Nor has the national science agency, the CSIRO, or the market operator, AEMO, criticised Frontier’s work, which is notable given Labor’s reliance on these organisations for advice on energy economics.

Strange, the pond must have read CSIRO refutes Coalition case nuclear is cheaper than renewable energy due to operating life in some sort of fever dream.

It would have been negligent, derelict for the reptiles to have ignored the oracle of New England, and so Barners, onetime of Tamworth, onetime a city at the centre of the known universe, was wheeled in for an AV distraction (apparently the centre of the universe has shifted to Mar-a-Lago):

Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce says Labor’s anti-nuclear scare campaigns are an expected “overreaction”. “Overreaction you would expect,” Mr Joyce said. “From people who just do not want an alternative to baseload power.”

Inspirational stuff, though the pond was shattered that the reptiles preferred a snap of an abject cliff top dweller to Barners himself.

Ted was inspired by Barners' back up to dismiss those neighsayers in remote 'leet circles:

As the CSIRO and AEMO say in their GenCost report on the levelised cost of energy, their work is “not a substitute for … electricity system modelling”. Full electricity system modelling is precisely what Frontier did. Frontier also used CSIRO and AEMO’s cost assumptions, but modelled nuclear even more conservatively at $10,000/KW.
No wonder Labor is struggling to find a line of attack. But that hasn’t stopped Chalmers claiming Labor’s energy plan will drive higher economic growth, despite it costing 44 per cent more than the Coalition’s through to 2050. It takes some mental gymnastics to follow Chalmers’ logic, but it goes something like this: Labor will build a bigger electricity system and thus the economy should grow more.
What Chalmers doesn’t understand is that, by itself, a bigger electricity system only guarantees higher costs and a greater environmental burden. He also clearly doesn’t know that Australians used less electricity from the grid over the past decade and yet the economy still grew. Whether more electricity enables the economy to grow depends on how it is used, which in turn is a function of its cost and reliability. Labor’s renewables-only plan fails on both counts compared to the Coalition’s: it will be far more expensive and it will be unreliable without 24/7 baseload power. It will also emit more by 2050.
While the Coalition has accepted an AEMO forecast for an electricity system that expands by 60 per cent by 2050, Labor’s policies require a system more than twice the size of our current one.
This will come at a massive $640bn cost that will ultimately hit people’s bills, and this is only the utility-scale costs. It excludes the cost of rooftop solar, home batteries and EVs that Labor wants households to pay for out of their own pockets.
Chalmers also doesn’t understand what is driving Labor’s desire for a bigger grid. But it is all laid out in AEMO’s Integrated System Plan – which the Prime Minister has confirmed is also Labor’s plan.
First, Labor is taking a ginormous bet on green hydrogen. Labor plans to use the equivalent of 30 per cent of current grid consumption for green hydrogen by 2050.
While there’s a role for green hydrogen, making it commercially scalable requires a far lower cost of production. Building a far more expensive system isn’t how you get there.

Just to remind readers of the visionary, the energy sage desperate to nuke the country to save the planet - though most of the reptiles seem to think it doesn't need saving - the lizard Oz provided a snap of the 'think small' man, Ted O'Brien in question time. Picture: Martin Ollman

As for EVs, don't even dream about it...

Second, Labor is taking a similar big bet on electric vehicles. Its plan is for 99 per cent of all vehicles on the road to be EVs by 2050. Australians don’t like being told what to do, let alone what car to drive. Until tradies, farmers and grey nomads have a change of heart about their preferred vehicles, this is yet another Labor pipedream.

Damn you Uncle Leon, you preening prat... why, it's a futuristic electric nightmare ...

 ...there's not a grey nomad in sight, much like you can't find a working charger on the Hume ...

And then there's that electricity mania:

Third, Labor wants to electrify everything. Its plan is for people to disconnect their homes from gas, and refurbish their kitchens, bathrooms and heating systems to be powered only by electricity.

Not the kitchens!

Ted had the pond sobbing in fear and fright ... and then he settled it all with a final burst...

This is, again, to come out of the family budget, at a cost Labor won’t disclose. None of these are policies to enable economic growth, but rather an ideological wish list that flagrantly disregards the impact on everyday Australians. To be fair, Labor’s desire to more than double the size of the electricity system does accommodate one economic lever – higher population growth. According to Oxford Economics Australia, this assumption is a key driver of economic growth in Labor’s plan.
Chalmers should clarify how big an Australia he’s planning for. As a nation, we’re already struggling amid a housing crisis, and our cities and roads are congested and need modernisation.
Yet, instead of allocating scarce capital to tackle problems such as housing and infrastructure, the Treasurer is misallocating investment for a colossal overbuild of our electricity system.
Labor’s plan will make Australians poorer and our economy weaker.
Ted O’Brien is opposition energy spokesman.

Ted has convinced the pond, and the sooner we all get back to a coal-fired country - pending nuking it on a never never time line - the better for all ...

The pond had thought to give Peter Kurti a go, what with him offering up Citizenship based on rights won’t restore nation’s civil society, The practice of citizenship entails a shared responsibility that each of us bears for the wellbeing of the national community to which we belong. It is a responsibility that cannot be delegated to others.

But then the pond stumbled at the end:

...One sign of that weakening is that whereas Australians habitually trusted one another to “do the right thing” in every situation, we are now much less trusting of one another and have become increasingly suspicious of anything and anyone unfamiliar to us.
Turning the page of a new year, as we have just done, is an appropriate moment for us to rethink our attitudes to one another and to our nation.
Australia remains a beacon to hordes overseas eager to share our good fortune. After all, six million people from many countries have become citizens here since 1949 when a new citizenship law came into force.
So it should be of concern to each of us that the bonds of participation and belonging – the key marks of citizenship – are fraying.
One factor accounting for this fragmentation is identity politics-based multiculturalism that has continued to generate enclaves not only keen to preserve cultures distinct from Australia but that are also increasingly intolerant of difference.

Oh FFS, not the old identity politics multiculturalism dog whistle about pesky, difficult furriners (aka Muslims, never Catholics loyal to Rome).

Another factor is that we are now quick to assert rights against others: the right to do whatever we want, the right to choose for ourselves (including now the right to die when we want) and the right to cancel those with whom we disagree.

Except of course, those wretches who celebrate multiculturalism and such like, they simply can't be tolerated and must be cancelled, because preaching about cancel culture is the first duty of the anti-woke.

And so on, and so dribbling forth, in a way far from inspirational and communal:

But we have forgotten that rights also involve duties, such as the duty to tolerate the views we dislike. We are inclined to see citizenship as matter of status – asserting the rights that flow from the political fact of being a citizen.
But we need to expand our focus and understand that a principal chief factor of citizenship is not so much status as practice. In other words, we need to reframe our idea of citizenship not so much in terms of being as of doing.
The practice of citizenship entails a shared responsibility that each of us bears for the wellbeing of the national community to which we belong.
It is a responsibility that cannot be delegated to others; neither is it one that can be shunned – at least if we are sincere about our pride in identifying as citizens of the nation of Australia.
Perhaps practical citizenship does not come naturally to us. After all, it requires that we consis­tently preference the needs of others over our own needs and desires.
But we have many examples set before us and the annual anointing of leading citizens as Australians of the Year can, if nothing else, encourage us to strive for yet higher ideals in 2025.
Peter Kurti is director of the culture, prosperity and civil society program at the Centre for Independent Studies and adjunct associate professor of law at the University of Notre Dame Australia.

By golly, they must be desperate at Notre Dame if this is the best they can do ...

Yadda, yadda all the way, and instead for a bonus, the pond turned to Lionel aka Margaret aka Maggie (according to her wiki, as a tomboy she felt a masculine name was more appropriate), a woman with any number of issues, but most notably in recent times frantic in her scribbling about woke brain rot, which naturally invokes the standard pond contractual requirement:

Not so much fuckhead perhaps as Maggie head ...

This offering came to the lizard Oz days late via The Times, Donald Trump’s election win shows progressive lunacy has been roundly defeated, A decisive death knell for identity politics offers hope of an end to stupid debates — such as whether women can have penises, or if racial discrimination cures racism.

Dash it all, but naturally it began with a snap of King Donald I and somebody or other, Donald Trump’s election win over Kamala Harris may have signalled a turning point for identity politics. Picture: AFP:

Sadly Lionel completely ignored the way things have moved on since those ancient times. There's not a single mention of the current civil war ...

... which admittedly is something of a relief, given the pond feels the need to swear off it for the moment, it being too intoxicating, especially as we haven't even yet reached inauguration day ...

Instead Lionel was still basking in the wonders of the non-left media world ...

Across the non-left media world, it’s now an article of faith that Donald Trump’s emphatic victory is a woke watershed. After asking petulantly for year upon year, “Now have we hit peak woke?”, like children on the back seat nagging daddy “are we there yet?”, we learn repeatedly from conservative outlets that the progressive lunacy that has tormented us since about 2014 (if not since 1965) has been roundly defeated.
A decisive death knell for identity politics dangles the blessed possibility of no longer squandering our brief duration on this Earth on stupid conversations and debates over whether: women can have penises; racial discrimination cures racism; advancement in employment and education should be determined by skin colour; the Western civilisation that gave us penicillin, Rembrandt, Bach and the Hubble Space Telescope is a disgrace; being grotesquely fat is healthy; 

Indeed, indeed, waiter, spare the big Macs ...

Sorry for that portly interruption, do go on ...

and wearing a sombrero that you bought yourself on Amazon is theft.
Friends, the folks who’ve really been stealing – and high-value items: our precious time, energy and attention – are the doctrinal morons who’ve roped us into addressing these painfully self-evident questions. I have devoted whole afternoons to seriously considering whether a mass movement to sterilise children and cut off their healthy body parts is a good idea.

Friends? Nah, you're not my friend, why you're not even an American politician seeking a donation. 

And as for doctrinal morons, shouldn't we be talking about the retards, and all the face fucking,  and all the fools ...

Kekius Maximus? Don't ask, it's what toddlers do, and the pond feels like doing it too, having just endured two and a half hours of life-wasting Gladiator II, stunning evidence that 2024 provided strong rivals to Megalopolis for 'worst picture of the year' awards...

Meanwhile, the reptiles were fixated on the horror, the horror, Trans rights demonstrators protest moves in the UK to make it harder for transgender people to self-identify. Picture: Getty Images

Lionel, aka Maggie, was keen to celebrate the persecution of the different and the other ...

Agreed, then: we yearn to put this rank idiocy behind us. In fact, I’m intensely curious how this period of communal madness will be regarded once it’s foreshortening in the rear-view mirror. Will this era’s edges blur until, in retrospect, “cancel culture” is remembered as rather cute? Will historians recall only that for a funny little period people cared innocuously more than usual about “social justice”? Or will the reign of woke instead take its place alongside Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Stalin’s show trials and Pol Pot’s killing fields as a lower-fatality example of a whole society losing its collective mind?
As for that rear-view mirror, there are promising signs. Preferred pronouns are quietly dropping from email signatures. The sanctimonious University of Michigan is firing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff. Walmart has dropped the term DEI altogether. Investors are suing the retailer Target for putting commitments to DEI, environmental, social and governance and Pride Month above the interests of shareholders. Formerly left-wing Silicon Valley billionaires are publicly excited about, or even bidding to participate in, the Trump administration.

Ah yes, the billionaires, such fun, and never mind the left behinds ...

At this point the reptiles decided to interrupt with an AV distraction, Journal Editorial Report: From DEI to ESG, progressive projects faltered.

Lionel was on a roll ...

The atmosphere on podcasts is suddenly more permissive; why, it might finally be safe to make a joke. In the UK, the 2024 John Lewis Christmas advert doesn’t look as though it was filmed in Nigeria. In the US, Democratic media figures are drowning in self-pity, while the viewership of the hectoring MSNBC channel has plummeted. Red states are banning gender-defying care for minors, and these laws have a good chance of holding up in the US Supreme Court. The word “retarded” is enjoying a comeback.

Yes, there's no better fun than mocking the physically or intellectually challenged.  (It's appropriate to give them a punch in the guts along with the verbal assault, just to remind them of the place assigned to retards and literary scribblers giving themselves airs and graces).

Still, I worry that we’re jumping the gun. This dogma has infected all our institutions like a fungus. It won’t be easy to eradicate. Ever notice how quickly, after a full complement of treatments, athlete’s foot comes right back? One American election won’t do the trick. There are too many people with a vested interest in wokery because “decolonising the curriculum”, say, is their job. Many a museum director has been hired expressly to ensure an art collection doesn’t acquire work by white people.
Numerous black female hires who tick two boxes in a diversity “buy one, get one free”, but are sometimes conspicuously under-qualified, such as ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay, owe their appointments to that fungal way of thinking, and they won’t all go quietly. America’s entire Democratic Party is steeped in this brain rot, and Kamala Harris still came within 1.5 percentage points of winning the popular vote.

Wokery?

Sorry, there were just too many references for the pond to evade strict contractual requirements whenever the concept comes out ...

Meanwhile, there's nothing like random death to get the likes of the reptiles and Lionel excited, A protester at the court case involving Daniel Penny, who was acquitted over the death of Jordan Neely, who had been threatening people on a subway. Picture: AFP

Damn you, if someone's misbehaving on a bus or a train, the best solution is to just take them out. Kill 'em, kill 'em all. A slaughter fest ...

Won't give up a seat in a bus? You need Sly Stallone ... sure, there might be a little collateral damage, the odd window shattered, but it's being civic minded.

On both sides of the Atlantic the universities, the judicial system, NGOs, the legal and medical professions, the news media, cultural institutions, theatre, publishing, film: they’ve all been putrefied by the zombie fungus. Picture the special effects for The Last of Us, all those hairy tendrils and fibrous clumps crawling up the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan.
So this is a long fight that’s not yet won. That’s not to detract from the cheerful impression that we sane people do seem to have gained the upper hand right now. Indeed, I’ve never doubted that our level-headed and unindoctrinated contingent – however beleaguered, persecuted and shockingly few in number – has always been destined to win, because lunacy eventually collapses from its own contradictions. It has only ever been a question of how much longer we have to put up with this staggering bullshit.
As for the present juncture, I have a theory. Let’s remember the nature of the opposition. Wokesters are conformists. They didn’t invent their wretched ideas; they’re reading from a common hymn sheet. That’s why they all use the same words and subscribe to the exact same roster of convictions, no matter how preposterous: these people aren’t original thinkers. But they imagine they’re at the cutting edge. Being “progressive” means they’re in the vanguard. They think woke makes them modern, makes them hip.

Sadly at this point the pond ran out of woke illustrations for that use of "wokesters", though the splendid irony of Lionel conforming to MAGA world thinkery did provide a consoling irony.

Then came a snap of reptile favourites, big in the Victorian liberal party, Members of the TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminists) movement in Melbourne in March. Picture: Tony Gough

Deeply weird, and a cue for a final burst from Lionel ...with more "woke" mentions than any soma head could stand ...

Whatever the more complex truth of the matter, it’s in our interest to promote the trope that woke is over. That woke has been vanquished. That woke is totally yesterday, hopelessly stale and played out. That the rest of us are moving on to genuinely thorny questions that aren’t stupid. That we’ll no longer waste our time pushing back against petty amateur linguists who insist we call the portly “people living with obesity”. That, whatever our private reservations about the guy, Trump’s election marks a hard Before and After. That as Kamala would say, we’ve “turned the page” and “we’re not going back”.
Because when you say something enough times (this is a gambit the wokesters themselves have mastered) you can make it true. Wokesters are highly suggestible. Furthermore, most of these folks don’t really care about social justice. They care about appearing to care about social justice. They care about other people’s esteem. They care about fitting in. They echo what everyone else around them says, because being a mindless copycat means other mindless copycats will like them and they’ll keep their friends and their jobs. And they care about social fashion.
So they won’t spout lingo like “cisgender” if that might risk an eye-roll at parties. They won’t want to seem behind the times. If we convince them that woke is over, that their BLM lawn signs are passé, that maundering about “white privilege” is boring and old hat, they’ll drop the whole patriarchy/ neurodiversity/heteronormativity et al package in a New York minute. We just have to persuade them that woke is unhip. Which it always has been, but some people are slow.

It turned out the whole rant was just a handy way to promote a book ...Lionel Shriver’s latest book, Mania, is published by the Borough Press. This article was first published by Spiked.
The Times

Shame about the reviews ...

For people who only think of Shriver for her culture war op-eds – it’s been a long time since We Need to Talk About Kevin – she’s always been a distinctively straight-shooting literary critic. Even she seems to sense that, for all the needle, this novel lacks verve or sass, stretching thinly dramatised ideas – political correctness has gone mad; we should worry about Putin, not pronouns – over nearly 300 pages. When Emory asks: “Why is this so personal for you, Pearson? So maybe there’s such a thing as variable human intelligence, and maybe there isn’t. What does it matter? Most of all, why does it matter between you and me?”, it’s as if even Shriver is beginning to lose interest, and we’re only a third of the way through. Pearson begins one expository tranche by telling us: “To my embarrassment, here I am relating picayune points of philological fascism – the death of the ‘dumbbell’ – while, out in the rest of the world, events of more considerable moment were afoot.” Another ends: “Transcribing this is tedious and depressing, so I think that taster will suffice.” Yup.

Yup, make that a triple yup to go ... and finally it would be remiss of the pond not to note Charlie Sykes doing limericks in a way that Lionel might approve ...

Trump's nominee RFK junior

Pretends to defend the consumer

But a worm in his brain

Seemed to drive him insane

Now his intellect's only a rumor

**

He says he is anti-vaccine,

And that immunization's obscene

His polio plan

Is to impose a ban

Making iron-lung tech more routine.

Of glamorous dreams she had many,

But of love felt Melania not any

Still, her life became fraught

when despite what she'd thought

She really had earned every penny

As for Lionel's new year, it's full of splendid hopes, tremendous visions, mindlessly moronic nattering about woke, and an ongoing civil war ...