In which Dame Groan and the Riddster make guest appearances, but the pond also steps out of the tent, which is to say the lizard Oz hive mind ...

 

What with the genocide in Gaza and Vlad the sociopath at work in Ukraine and the elevation of a mango Mussolini, it's easy to ignore some infractions, which is why it's pleasing to see the Graudian taking note of the Taliban ...

The latest round of fundamentalist lunacy - even more than the first round - was noted last month in France24, Taliban leader bans windows overlooking places 'usually used by women', Afghanistan's Taliban leader has ordered that new residential buildings are constructed without windows looking onto "places usually used by women" and said that existing windows with such views should be blocked to prevent "obscene acts". 

There's no need to move beyond the barking mad header, which says it all.

Meanwhile, the (deeply male) Afghanistan cricket team saunters around the world, as if all this has nothing to do with them.

This produced some fair degree of irritation in Jonathan Liew in the Graudian in Dignity and humanity of Afghan women must be worth more than game of cricket.

Catherine Bennett also got agitated in the Graudian in Visit Afghanistan, land of culture, cricket and women closeted in their own homes, Specialist travel companies are using euphemisms to avoid the gender apartheid.

Speaking of apartheid, there is a sensible response, to be found in ECB urged to boycott Afghanistan game in Champions Trophy by UK politicians

• More than 160 sign letter condemning ‘sex apartheid’
• Women’s cricket team disbanded under Taliban rule.

What's weird? It brought together folks as disparate as Nige and Jeremy:

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has been urged to boycott next month’s Champions Trophy match against Afghanistan by a group of more than 160 politicians, including Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and Lord Kinnock.
The England men’s ODI side are due to face Afghanistan in Lahore on 26 February but there are calls from Westminster for the ECB to refuse the fixture, taking a stand against the Taliban regime’s ongoing assault on women’s rights.
Female participation in sport has effectively been outlawed since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, a move that puts the Afghanistan Cricket Board in direct contravention of International Cricket Council (ICC) rules, which require full members to organise a women’s national team.
With Afghanistan’s men’s team still allowed to compete by the ICC despite the women’s side being disbanded in 2021, a strongly worded letter has emerged from parliament pleading for the ECB to make its own moral objection.
Written by the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi and signed by a wide cross-party group from the House of Commons and House of Lords, it raises concerns over the “insidious dystopia” and “sex apartheid” unfolding in Afghanistan.

Well yes, whether it's MAGA raging at trans people or the Taliban in a deeply Freudian fear of women, there's a lot to be said for wokeness, aka a concern for and interest in human rights.

How the Afghanistan cricket team gets away with it is a mystery, until you realise that the reptiles never lose a single days sleep over such matters ...and that's why the pond wandered off down that path...

Reading the lizard Oz these days rarely sees anything of interest at the top of the digital edition, rarely offers anything connected to the events of the day, unless involving an increasingly narrow band of reptile interests ...

The reptiles did at least note that there were extraordinary fires burning down large portions of LA. 

Naturally the reptiles could be expected to resist any obvious connection to climate change. You'd only read this sort of conclusion in the Graudian or some greenie leftie publication ...

...The Palisades fire was primed to explode from what fire officials call a perfect storm of dry vegetation and high winds blowing flames into a heavily populated area. But what makes this fire so unusual is its timing, in January, when the California rainy season typically extinguishes the threat of infernos until spring.
This year, however, Southern California has been off to one of its driest seasons on record. Downtown Los Angeles has received just 4mm of rain since October 1, compared with a normal total of 116mm so far, according to the National Weather Service. Northern California, by contrast, has received a bounty of rain and snow.

That sort of talk would be accompanied by some sort of alarmist, hysterical photo showing the fires of hell let loose on earth ...Embers whip across the ground as homes burn in Pasadena, California. Picture: AFP.

Then the sneaky greenies would slip in an almost subliminal, covert mention of their pet obsession...

The fire threat has increased greatly in California and other parts of the West amid a hotter and drier climate and an expansion of homes into the wildland areas surrounding major cities. Sixteen of the 20 most destructive fires on record in California have broken out in the past decade, according to Cal Fire.

Yes, there it is, snuck into the reporting in a typically subversive way, "amid a hotter and drier climate".

Damn you, cunning greenies, damn you to hell.

Say what? That mention came as the local reptiles unwittingly deployed reporting from The Wall Street Journal.

Here, have a cartoon to celebrate massive destruction in an American city ..."amid a hotter and drier climate". The solution is to hand in Melbourne ...

What else? Well, over on the extreme far right, there were a truly dismal set of offerings, not ameliorated by the absence of petulant Peta ...

Jack the Insider on sugar? The Riddster getting agitated about a heritage listing? Mike Kelly doing his best to downplay the Gaza genocide? A Groaning about a rates cut?

It truly is the silly season, and what's missing?

In years gone by the reptiles would have been at the dangers of social media, hammering away at their rivals, castigating Zuck the cuck suck ...

But not today. 

Why have the reptiles gone MIA? 

There's plenty of it about at the moment ... the Graudian was on a roll, Meta is ushering in a ‘world without facts’, says Nobel peace prize winner, Maria Ressa warns of ‘dangerous times’ for journalism and democracy after move to end factchecking in US

There was also ‘Dispiriting’: factchecker reacts to Meta’s move to scrap role, As told to Robert Booth, Mark Zuckerberg accused fact-checkers in US of making biased decisions

Not to mention, though the pond will mention it, Mark Zuckerberg has gone full Maga, Siva Vaidhyanathan, It’s a mistake to describe the Meta CEO’s move as a retreat from ‘fact-checking’: it’s a retreat from limiting harm to users

The Graudian even whipped up an editorial, The Guardian view on content moderation: Meta did far too little. Now it wants to do even less. Inter alia ...

...Meta can no longer claim to act in haste and repent at leisure. It is retreating from harm prevention knowing what will result: Mr Zuckerberg acknowledged that “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”. An internal memo leaked in 2021 acknowledged that core parts of its platform appeared hardwired for spreading misinformation and divisive content. And 3.3 billion people now access one of its core products daily.
Mr Zuckerberg is ingratiating himself with Donald Trump – who complains of bias at Meta and has threatened the billionaire – while cutting costs by outsourcing moderation to users. Mr Trump will soon have the power to kill the federal anti-trust case against Meta, release regulatory pressure on big tech and offer a supportive environment for AI.
Mr Zuckerberg also pledged to work with him “to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more”. To put it another way: democratically elected leaders are seeking to hold powerful businesses accountable and protect their citizens and societies. The UK’s Online Safety Act and the EU Digital Services Act are imperfect but essential tools which must be used to their full effect.
Advertisers don’t like being promoted next to hate content. But Meta’s dominance means that few want to quit its platforms. In the US, accountability will probably fall to states, like the more than 30 who are suing Instagram on the grounds that its addictive nature has contributed to a youth mental health crisis.
here are even greater concerns abroad. Former Meta employee Frances Haugen said that she became a whistleblower “to save the lives of people, especially in the global south, who I think are being endangered by Facebook’s prioritisation of profits over people”.
In Myanmar, UN investigators blamed the spread of hate speech on Facebook for fuelling pogroms which killed tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims. The platform acknowledged that it had been used to incite offline violence. In India, Meta has been accused of failing to stop the spread of Islamophobic hate speech, calls to violence and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories on its platforms.
As the Nobel peace laureate Maria Ressa warned, this is about safety. These changes will be damaging everywhere. But they threaten the greatest harm in countries where Meta has extraordinary market dominance, where governments themselves foment hate speech or disinformation, and where such material has already spread to devastating and sometimes deadly effect.

David Rothkopf got excited in the Beast in Opinion: Under Trump’s Thumb, Mark Zuckerberg Has No F---s Left to Give. The F-Word Here is Facts (outside the soft paywall). Inter alia:

...If billionaires are so powerful, how come so many of them are behaving like such weaklings around Donald Trump?
One by one, they seem to kiss the ring. Most recently, we have Mark Zuckerberg tugging at his curly forelock before our next president, demonstrating loyalty if not subservience by promoting a former Republican operative within his own organization, naming a close Trump pal to its board of directors, and announcing policies to eliminate fact-checkers and move “content review” teams from blue California to red Texas. (The fact-checkers will be replaced by “community notes”—you know, the system that has worked so well at “X.”)
Before him had Jeff Bezos, who like Zuckerberg has bent his knee, and who has overseen a shift at the newspaper he controls, the Washington Post, to dial-back criticism of Trump. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, has required similar changes. (Zuckerberg, Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Sam Altman and many others have also written big checks to support Trump’s inauguration.)
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has gone even further, paying rent to live at Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s monument to sycophancy.
A total of 13 billionaires (so far) have signed on to serve in Trump’s incoming administration. Between them, they control wealth worth some $600 billion, more than the GDP of all but about two dozen countries—Musk alone is worth nearly half a trillion dollars. And that, of course, does not count the billionaires like Bezos, Soon-Shiong, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and others across the financial and business elite who support Trump but are not actively serving in the administration....

The pond was bitterly disappointed. No mention of the Emeritus Chairman, but then Rothkopf came good ... and helped the pond understand why the reptiles had given a pass to Zuck the cuck suck ...

...These billionaires who are now enlisting as MAGA foot-soldiers are not schmucks. They are not just kissing up to Trump because he will be the big man on campus for the next few years, or because it will help them further feather their nests—although, as noted above, when you are as pathologically greedy as you must be to become a billionaire, that kind of thing is never far from your thinking.
They are doing it because they have seen that democracy is often costly for them, with its periodic elevation of people whose policies nag at them—raising their taxes, increasing regulations, diminishing their influence, promoting the competition they say they love but that in actuality they hate and seek to destroy at all costs.
How do you ultimately eliminate the risk that a government might, even for a moment, favor the masses rather than the richest few among us? You get campaign finance laws changed so that the wealthiest are super-empowered. You get voting rights legislation changed to reduce the influence of those who might oppose your agenda. Check and check.
What next? Well, you don’t stop just because you have taken control of the courts and the Congress and the presidency.
While there is a lot of focus on concerns about creeping authoritarianism in today’s America, there are other ways to neutralize or otherwise manage the influence of American voters. One of the most powerful of these is to control the information flows upon which an electorate depends on to make informed political decisions. Truth is the most dangerous enemy of would-be (and actual) autocrats.
Recognizing that, these people have long worked to change and corrupt our information ecoystems to advance their narratives and compromise those of their opponents. Their scheme is designed to once and for all make it impossible for voters to know what is true and what is not. Getting billionaires to move their fourth-estate vanity projects and social media hubs out of the news business and into the propaganda business is part of the plan. Rupert Murdoch may have started it but Musk, Zuckerberg, Soon-Shiong and the less overt but nonetheless wobbly-kneed owners of other major platforms and outlets are following his lead.

Of course, of course, how to berate Zuck the cuck suck when the Emeritus Chairman started it, and others are merely following his lead? 

Do finish this tale of slavish, supine, lickspittle billionaire behaviour ...

Trump’s administration will chart a new path. They will do it by cooking the books produced by U.S. government agencies so the numbers tell a story, any story, as they wish it were rather than as it really is. (You recall previous efforts to do this during the COVID-19 pandemic, or the nonsensical time Trump employed a Sharpie to redraw the path of a hurricane.) They will do it by threatening and perhaps prosecuting those who offer “alternative facts” and critical views. They will do it by getting rid of experts whose focus on facts and science undermines the political positions of those in power—and by defunding education programs more broadly.
Making truth indistinguishable from the self-serving lies of the leadership class is as deadly a blow as can be struck against any democracy, especially one that is in as fragile state as our own. It is every bit as fatal—indeed it is much the same—as denying voters the right to express themselves or rigging election results.
And that is what many of the billionaires currently making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago—like Zuckerberg and Bezos—are doing.

There were many other stories along similar lines. Even the Nine rags joined in, with In one fell swoop, Meta enters its ‘post-truth’ era. (soft paywall).

Inter alia:

...“We don’t think a private company like Meta should be deciding what’s true or false, which is exactly why we have a global network of fact-checking partners who independently review and rate potential misinformation across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp,” Meta said in a post about the program at the time.
It no longer thinks that.
Those third-party fact-checkers have proven to be “too politically biased” and have destroyed “more trust than they’ve created”, particularly in the United States, according to Zuckerberg.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech.”
The company will shift to relying on user-led community notes like those on X, formerly known as Twitter. That process involves users themselves providing context or fact-checking posts, rather than anyone official.
In another move ripped from the Elon Musk playbook, Meta is also shifting its moderation team from California to Texas, in changes Zuckerberg admitted would catch “less bad stuff” on his platforms.
There are signs that the move didn’t involve a lot of advance planning. It wasn’t telegraphed to the company’s fact-checkers, some of whom had been there for a decade.
Lead Stories fact-checker Maarten Schenk told Forbes the first he learned of Meta’s plan to scrap its partnership with independent journalists was through a press release. “We were not notified in advance so it was just, boom this is ending,” he said.

Existing fact-checking deals with international newsrooms and charities, including in Australia, are expected to run until the end of the year.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has announced the company will be removing independent fact-checkers from its social media platforms.
It comes as Silicon Valley jostles to curry favour with Trump, partly in the hopes that it can win a lighter touch from regulators.
Last week, Meta tapped Bush-era Republican Joel Kaplan to serve as its global head of policy, replacing former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.
Then, just this week, the company named Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White – a long-time Trump supporter – to its board of directors. Meta has also donated to Trump’s inauguration fund, a first for the company.
Silicon Valley is jostling to curry favour with Donald Trump, partly in hope it can win a lighter touch from regulators.
What Zuck is promising might sound appealing to some: a return of the internet to its roots, which was designed to allow for free speech and open debate. That’s a naive outlook, however, that doesn’t reflect what the internet is in 2025.
In 1995 – and even in 2004 when Facebook was invented – the internet was a much simpler place: it was a place for Flash games, cheesy animations, recipes, Hotmail and message boards.
Social media has made the internet a much more complex – and arguably worse – place, littered with toxicity, privacy intrusions, child pornography, fake news and abuse.
For Zuckerberg to enact changes that will catch “less bad stuff” on his platforms is a big step in the wrong direction, particularly when so much momentum has gathered globally about tweaking social media for the better.
In Australia, the proposed social media age ban has been contentious but at a minimum, it’s stirred a productive conversation about the pros and cons of social media, particularly as it relates to the mental health of young people.
Social media is already a dumpster fire at the best of times. To make it a Wilder West of misinformation will make it an even less appealing place than it has become. And for Meta to make that move to please the political whims of Trump should be viewed as an abdication of the serious responsibility that comes with operating a platform used by 3 billion people.
For Zuckerberg to highlight gender and immigration as topics that will be less restricted should be worrying, particularly for minority groups who might be directly affected by hateful posts, like immigrants or LGBTQ people.
Calling women “household objects” will now be permissible under Meta’s new guidelines, as will calling transgender people “freaks”.
Facebook – and social media more broadly – is now firmly in its “post-truth” era. And its billions of users will likely be worse off.

Why the Nine rags and not the reptiles? Credit where credit is due ...

David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper. 

He's a reptile refugee. 'Nuff said. 

Meanwhile over at Crikey, apparently AAP FactCheck thought they were still in the Meta fact checking game ... (paywall)

Put it another, more visual way...

In short, though the pond went long, the reptiles haven't the slightest interest in icebergs, Titanics, Zuck the cuck suck, the truth or climate science.

The pond supposes it should at least make some feeble attempt to fulfil its mission statement for herpetology studies 101, and so turned to Dame Groan for a short 3 minute groan, February RBA rate cut possible, but don’t bet the house on it, One of the key issues is whether or not these figures, both the good and the bad aspects, will make any difference to the deliberations of the Reserve Bank next month. Is there enough in the data to affect their thinking?

The problem for Dame Groan was a simple one, how to talk down any hint of good news. 

The reptiles helped with one of those sullen snaps they so love, Treasurer Jim Chalmers speaks during a press conference in Brisbane following the release of monthly CPI data. Picture: Dan Peled/NewsWire

Look at the wretch, guilty as hell, head bowed, slumped into despair. It was a simple matter for Dame Groan to finish him off.

The release of the November monthly CPI figures contained some good news and some bad news.
The good news was that the increase in the trimmed mean was 3.2 per cent in the 12 months to November, down from 3.5 per cent in the previous month, nudging that all important target band of 2 to 3 per cent.
The bad news was that the monthly headline figure rose by 2.3 per cent, up from 2.1 per cent in the previous month. The figure of 2.3 per cent is slightly higher than expectations. The timing of the receipt of electricity bill rebates partly explains what went on with the headline figure. Automotive fuel also fell during the month, although Australia is totally exposed to the vagaries of international movements in the oil price.
The top contributors to the overall rise in consumer price rises during the month were food and non-alcoholic beverages; alcohol and tobacco; and recreation and culture. Consumers will no doubt have noticed these outsized movements.

The reptiles did break up the groaning with an AV offering ...

Treasurer Jim Chalmers warns interest rates are one of the “big pressures” on household budgets right now. “One of the major pressures on household budgets is one of the major reasons why our economy has seen relatively soft growth over the last year or so,” Mr Chalmers told Sky News Australia. “Whether it’s higher interest rates, cost of living pressures, international economic uncertainty – all of those things have combined to put pressure on people and slow our national economy as well.”

That was most notable for showing the smug, arrogant Jimbo pursing his lips as he contemplated the wreckage he'd created. It was an easy task for Dame Groan to take him down a peg or two ...

One of the key issues is whether or not these figures, both the good and the bad aspects, will make any difference to the deliberations of the Reserve Bank to be held in early February. (Note here that it will be the old board that meets, with the new Monetary Policy Board due to commence in late March/early April.) Is there enough in the data to affect their thinking?
The first thing to say is that the monthly CPI figures are more limited in their scope than the comprehensive quarterly CPI figures. In the past, the ABS only released quarterly figures, which meant a long lag between data print and decision-making.
Having monthly CPI figures is an improvement – almost all advanced economies release monthly figures – but the quarterly release for the December quarter of last year, which is due on January 31, will be more important in influencing the RBA’s assessment.
While the bond traders still think it is more likely than not that the bank will cut the official cash rate in February – by 25 basis points, in all likelihood – this is by no means a done deal. After all, the bond traders have a habit of getting it wrong, as they did several times last year.
Michele Bullock, the bank’s governor, has made it clear the objective is to see inflation heading sustainably towards the target band before any cut is contemplated. She uses the term “sustainably” frequently. The last thing the bank wants is to see an uptick in the underlying inflation rate after it has initiated a period of rate cutting.
It is interesting to compare monetary policy here with what has happened in other countries. Having experienced similar surges in inflation after the pandemic, most other central banks increased their official interest rates more aggressively than the RBA, reaching higher maximums (5 per cent and above). Having then tamed inflation in a shorter time frame, these central banks started the process of cutting their official interest rates last year – the US Fed, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand all fit into this category.
The RBA has taken a different approach, tolerating above-target inflation for longer by raising the cash rate more modestly. The presumed upside has been a stronger labour market, although economic growth has been very weak. It remains an open question whether the approach of the RBA has been the best option.
There is now evidence emerging in a number of countries that falling inflation rates are levelling out. It’s not entirely clear whether there will be further cuts to official interest rates overseas in the next six months.
The big question in Australia is whether the RBA will cut the cash rate in February. I’m not sure it would be wise to bet your house on this outcome – to use a bad pun. April looks more likely, but this will be dependent on more data on price movements as well as economic conditions more generally.

And so to a bonus, though some might think that an extended stroll through the Taliban, Zuck the cuck suck and a hedging Groan more than enough.

But the pond has a soft spot for the Riddster ... anything emanating from the IPA is always an inspiration, and besides, like the Groaning, the reptiles only rated it a three minute read ...

Cape York needs development, not heritage listing, Proposals to list Cape York land as World Heritage raise questions about the value of such protection.

Right away the pond knew what had to be done ... just look at the opening snap, Sites in Cape York have been nominated to the World Heritage tentative list. Pictured are termite mounds on the Savanna Plains at Olkola Country.

Dammit, you could knock a four lane highway through that wretched boring landscape, offering a quick way to a Trump casino, and the north would be fixed, with plenty of jobs for indigenous folk, indentured to work as waiters and cleaners ...

Think of the tourism, think of the opportunities and benefits in destroying a landscape.

Naturally the Riddster was wild-eyed about development ...

The proposal by federal Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek and the previous Queensland Labor government for UNESCO World Heritage listing of vast parts of Cape York Peninsula has sparked an interesting clash between many in the local population, mainly Indigenous, and the green activists who have proposed the nomination.
But it also raises many other important issues for Cape York, the value of World Heritage listing and the wider matter of how to improve the living standards in remote Indigenous communities.
The exact parts of Cape York that are proposed do not seem to be publicly available but can include “pastoral leases, national parks, conservation parks, freehold land, Aboriginal-owned land, unallocated state land, sea country, private property and council reserves”. However, there must be landowner consent for all areas within the boundary.
This introduces an interesting fact. There is little privately owned land on Cape York, an area half as big as Victoria and with a population of about 20,000 people.
It comprises land mainly controlled by Indigenous organisa­tions; national parks that are owned largely by Indigenous organisations and run with the state government; or pastoral leases that are effectively state land.
There is no doubt Cape York has many remarkable environments and rock art sites that are already well protected. The question thus must be asked: What value is there in yet another layer of protection? Are Australia, Queensland and the local Indigenous groups incapable of making decisions that will protect the environment? What advantage is there for the local population?
Ironically, although Cape York is one of the most pristine environments on Earth, it requires more human intervention to truly maintain its unique habitats.
That intervention is fire – much more of it – the way the Aboriginal people burnt regularly before British settlement.
Lack of burning is a common problem with much of Australia’s native habitats, but Cape York has the best and oldest example of how the country has changed since Captain James Cook’s arrival. When stranded and half shipwrecked in the Endeavour River in 1770, Cook named a hill at the river mouth Grassy Hill.
That hill now is covered with low rainforest because of the cessation of fire management.
It is an extreme example showing that much of Cape York now has too many trees. The Aboriginal groups of Cape York know this problem well and the last thing they need is more green activists or “experts” from UNESCO telling them they must not burn – or do anything else.

There had to be a token reptile visual interruption, Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek speaks with Cape York Indigenous leaders at the announcement of a UNESCO tentative World Heritage listing in June. Picture: Peter Carruthers

What would any of that mob know? Trust the Riddster ...

Green activists often are eager to enlist the support of Indigenous groups in their campaigns, claiming they are natural allies of their activism. But this is not always the case. Indigenous people on Cape York and elsewhere have normal economic and lifestyle aspirations that make clashes inevitable.
Such a clash occurred in the mid-1980s in far north Queensland in the famous Daintree blockade campaign that was a precursor to the World Heritage listing of the far north Queensland rainforests.
The Bjelke-Petersen government was in favour of a new coast road through the rainforest linking Cape Tribulation to the Bloomfield River.
It ultimately became a very well used tourist road but was fiercely opposed by the green movement. However, many in the local Aboriginal community at Bloomfield were in favour of the road.
There are many claims that World Heritage listing will greatly increase tourism on Cape York. However, it seems improbable that such listing is a big factor in a tourist’s decision to visit. A similar argument was used before the listing of the far north Queensland rainforest but minimal tourism eventuated.
World Heritage listing could even damage tourism prospects. An example of this is the World Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef, about which UNESCO regularly berates the federal government. Despite the reef recording record amounts of coral in the past few years, UNESCO repeatedly claims the reef is in poor condition and broadcasts this accusation to the world’s media. Such bad publicity can be only detrimental to the reef’s tourist industry. If Cape York becomes listed, how long before UNESCO would be claiming it, too, is endangered, in poor shape, and that Australia needs to close a Cape York mine, reduce cattle numbers or ban fishing?
Cape York’s biggest problem, which it shares with most other remote Indigenous areas, is that it is already almost entirely run by various layers of central government – mainly the Indigenous organisations but also state and federal administrations.
It is the antithesis of a free-enterprise economy, being more akin to a socialist state. There is little private ownership of land. A quick search of realestate.com will reveal just a handful of properties for sale on the entire peninsula outside Cooktown.
Nothing happens anywhere without a committee or permission from a few committees. This collectivisation of control undermines attempts to use the land productively; aside from the inherent inefficiencies of collective ownership, any proposal just gets bogged down.
This is a problem that will have to be fixed if the region is to become economically successful. Giving away a significant amount of sovereignty to a supranational organisation that will be able to interfere with every decision is the last thing Cape York needs.

Credit where credit is due, Peter Ridd is chairman of the Australian Environment Foundation.

For those wondering about the Riddster and the AEF, they have a website, there's a short wiki listing, and there's a rather dated note at DeSmog explaining how it came by its IPA heritage listing ...sorry, the pond got that wrong, the AEF needs development, not a wretched heritage listing,

Finally, is there a solution to the world's woes, dealing with the reptiles' singular lack of interesting stories outside their hive mind obsessions?

Bring back Latin, says the pond, and so say others, in letters to the Graudian...

Latin can lay down skills that last a lifetime, For Prof Lesley Smith, learning Latin made more sense than learning French. Liz Byrne encourages other teachers to consider learning and teaching it

Memento mori, or memento vivere, or as we're shortly to be in the reign of King Donald I and President Leon, Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant ...