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 ...