In which the land of the long weekend continues with a lesser member of the Kelly gang ... and Blainers...

 

The holyday season continues, and this long weekend continues the slumbering nivarna of the hive mind. 

The pond deeply regrets its offerings this day, but it can only be a mirror to the lack of lustre in the reptile glitter ball ...

What a dismal top of the digital edition ma, and over on the extreme far right, it didn't get any better ...

The pond simply couldn't come at Jacinta Nampijinpa Price - today is an exercise in nausea control but there must be limits to the demands and stress put on mind and body, even in an exercise - while Polonius's spot will appear, as is right and proper, as a pond Sunday meditation.

What's left was extremely slim pickings, but there were two that allowed the pond to skip the hive mind's relentless, almost never ending patented form of down under Zionism.

As a sign that the reptiles were serving up a genuinely second eleven playing on town council matting, it was left to Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang, to deal with King Donald I.

Where's "Ned"? Where's the bromancer?

Thanks to the belated return of the Weekly Beast last Friday, the pond has at least discovered the fate of Killer Creighton.

He's gone full IPA rogue. 

The pond had a momentary panic attack, and wasn't entirely reassured at the news that Killer would still contribute a weekly column. 

The old ways are fading, the clowns are leaving the carnival - who will rail at masks and vaccines? - and all the pond was left with were tossers like Joe.

As a sign of the low rent times, the reptiles heaped in an abundance of snaps and AV distractions, dutifully noted, perhaps to hide the stench emanating from the verbiage, perhaps to disguise the banality of the offerings.

Muscular Trump brings America First back – but will it last?, Trump’s showmanship this week means many Americans already feel he’s delivering for them. But navigating the tides of US politics and world events will become harder - and the warning signs are there.

So many cliches in such a tedious header, and the opening snap matched the tone, Donald Trump speaks to the media after signing Executive Orders in the Oval Office of the White House. Picture: AFP.

The pond knew that there'd be no comedy, just a studied, silly, never sublime attempt to take King Donald I seriously:

The world is witnessing an audacious new model of executive leadership with an ascendant Donald Trump using his first week to test the limits of presidential power, challenge the American constitution and impose his will over the GOP in the US Congress.
This has been a successful opening gambit from Trump who has looked strong by acting swiftly and decisively through executive orders to deliver on his agenda. Already troops have been deployed to the southern border, deportation raids commenced, DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs terminated and bureaucrats returned to working from the office.
At the end of the first week, Trump is riding high and supremely confident – pardoning violent January 6 rioters, pressuring Putin to enter talks for a deal in Ukraine and threatening a global trade war at the World Economic Forum in Davos – telling the global elite:
“Come make your product in America and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on Earth. If you don’t make your product in America, you will have to pay a tariff.”

The pond could quibble - already a judge has struck a blow against the riding high King Donald I and daily there are reports on the Musk follies - but its holyday time ... so cue an AV distraction ...

US President Donald Trump has addressed business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The newly re-elected US President says he plans on boosting America's fossil fuel production. He is also vowing to reduce inflation by cutting regulation, implementing new tariffs and cutting taxes.

The lesser Joe eventually attempted a few caveats himself ...

But navigating the tides of US politics and world events will become harder and early warning signs are already emerging. Trump must resist the tendency to overreach; he has only a narrow margin in Congress, his executive orders have been hit with legal actions, the pardons for January 6 protesters have unnerved many on his own team and two Republicans, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, are opposing his nominee for Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth.
There are also questions over the future of the personal relationship between Trump and his key adviser Elon Musk, with the world’s richest man this week critiquing the $500bn “Stargate” AI project unveiled by the President. There must be questions over what impact a falling-out between the two men could have on the MAGA support base.

There are questions over the future of the personal relationship between Trump and his key adviser Elon Musk. Picture: AFP.

Questions? No time for humour? How about a billionaire walked into a bar and told a joke, or two, or three or four or five?

Joe rambled on ...

For the moment, Trump is seeing how much he can achieve by adopting a muscular approach to the top job. After only a few days of Trump 2.0, a number of initial judgments can be made about the new model of leadership on display in the White House.
Love him or despite him, Trump is the most effective political dramatist of the era. A natural showman, he has a flair for selling a political message and turning the great debates of the times into mass entertainment.

Love him or despite him? Here the pond should quickly note it always provides accurate transcripts, love or despite this methodology as you will ...

Back to Joe, imitating a stunned mullet ..

The stunning example of this new approach was how Trump ran the first day of his second term, starting with his inaugural address and ending with his free-wheeling Oval Office press conference.
The inaugural address was a masterclass in the art of contrast. To enliven the promise of the next four years – his “American golden age” – Trump mercilessly trashed the Democratic legacy of the previous four and discredited outgoing president Joe Biden.
Ungracious but effective, Trump knows his light will shine more brightly against a past that seems even darker. That is why Trump claims to be restoring “common sense” to government, describing the former administration as part of “a radical and corrupt establishment” that betrayed the interests of Americans.

Only a genuine member of the second eleven could offer those lines, followed up by another visual flourish ...

Donald Trump holds the executive order he signed to declassify the files of assassinated former President John F. Kennedy, former Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Picture: AFP.

Joe proceeded to be swept along by the tide ...

Hours later, Trump was approving the first of scores of executive orders at a desk in front of a stadium of 20,000 people who cheered wildly as he held up each signed measure. The effective use of theatre and showmanship means that – by the end of his first week – many Americans may feel he’s already delivering for them.
Second, Trump uses the presidency as a vehicle to project the force of his personality in a way unlike any other democratic leader of the modern age. Unscripted and often off-topic, he nevertheless appears authentic and different – a major difference from the average career politician.
As a salesman, he understands that his political brand – “Trump” – has become a cultural phenomenon that has penetrated deep into the American psyche. He is seeking to use that influence to assert his control over the GOP in Congress as well as the members of his incoming cabinet from whom he expects absolute and total loyalty.
This is a different use of presidential power from that of Joe Biden and a new experiment in American governance that may inspire other conservative leaders around the world to embrace a more robust approach to government – one that may tests the boundaries of democracy in new and unpredictable ways.
Perhaps the most defining feature on display this week about Trump’s approach to the presidency is that his conception of America’s historical mission is genuinely game-changing. It differs from that of all the presidents of the modern era who preceded him.
Rather than providing the benevolent economic and foreign policy leadership that countries in the Western world have come to accept – and even take for granted – Trump is on a crusade to put America First.

There seemed to be some dim awareness in the reptile hive mind that this might mean Australia Last, but never mind, have an echo of Nuremberg, Donald Trump addresses business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Picture: AFP.

A filthy rich con artist and snake oil salesman preaching to the filthy rich, and this was the best Joe could offer in response ...

Profound and far-reaching ramifications will arise from this switch in America’s historical mission, with the US already pursuing new tariffs – including against Canada, Mexico and China – and withdrawing from the World Health Organisation and Paris Climate Accord.
The value of security alliances that helped underpin the global order since World War Two are now being openly questioned, and demands are being made by Washington of other smaller nations aligned to America – some of which are reasonable and some not.
Such demands range from increasing defence spending – including up to 5 per cent of GDP for NATO members in Europe – to Denmark handing over the territory of Greenland or Canada merging with the US as the 51st State. There is no reason to believe Trump is not serious on all these fronts.
It is too early to know how the world will respond to the new Trumpian model. Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky this week questioned whether the US President even saw NATO as necessary or respected EU institutions – suggesting he could simply strike his own deals with the major players in world affairs.
“It’s not clear whether Europe will even have a seat at the table when the war against our country ends,” he said. “Will President Trump listen to Europe, or will he negotiate with Russia and China without Europe?”
Trump’s defeat of Joe Biden in November means his America First approach to the world may yet endure beyond the expiration of his second presidential term – another reason to believe, as Musk said earlier this week, that his November victory was a “fork in the road of human civilisation.”

And so we come to that fork in the road ...

... while Joe's analysis showed all the spine featured in this 'toon ...

Then came a truly dismal offering. According to his wiki, Blainers was born in 1930 ...

The pond will leave others to do the maths, and also leave off the commentary. 

The reptiles suggest it's an 8 minute read, a meandering effort from a man in his dotage ...Australia wasn’t utopia before British arrival, but it has gone close since, Stop glamorising the ancient past and look at all this young, fair and courageous nation has achieved since 1788.

Being of an age, the pond isn't usually ageist, but what to make of this opening visual offering?

The creation of a nation and its generations of worthwhile people should not be forgotten, another major reason to celebrate Australia Day. Artwork: Frank Ling

Frankly it said that while the nation might have been created, there wasn't much left of the creative nation ... with yet another Sydney-centric view of the world on parade, not to mention those bloody bikinis and all those bloody flags and yet again that bloody bridge, and those bloody ferries ... but at least Frank couldn't fit in that bloody Bondi beach.

On the other hand, that visual depth - all 1mm of it - matched the depth of the analysis to follow...

We should celebrate Australia Day. By various definitions this has been one of the most successful nations in the world. During the past two centuries our nation has had far more successes than failures, though the failures can’t be overlooked: they offer lessons.
Most Australians have pride in the nation, present and past. Today, in contrast, the most vocal opponents of Australia Day offer a gloomy version of our history and many even believe Aboriginal people were, in a variety of ways, better off before 1788 than they are today. Especially in Victoria, they are officially rewriting history and adding a strong racial emphasis. A view is widespread – even though still a minority view – that Australia will lack legitimacy until it makes continuing reparations to Aboriginal people for the land and way of life taken away from them.

Blainers had barely got into his stride when the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction:

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has responded to a new poll which found 61 per cent of Australians do not support changing the date of Australia Day. “This weekend, we’ll celebrate Australia Day and that’s a wonderful thing,” Mr Albanese said at the National Press Club. “The other thing that happens at Australia Day is there is a focus on the fullness and richness of our history including the fact that we all share this continent with the oldest, continuous culture on Earth and what a privilege it is. “Acknowledging, as well, it’s a hurtful day, a difficult day for many First Nations people but it’s one in which we can celebrate what we are today whether it be our great history going back 65,000 years or whether it is the arrival of Europeans here.”

Invasion day? Don't even think about it, time instead for some discreet black bashing ...

It is also argued that our nation will be redeemed only if Aboriginal people are permanently and undemocratically given more political power than other Australians. The nation has recorded a strong No to that argument in the 2023 voice referendum.
Many who dislike or resent Australia Day glamorise Australia’s first people. They see the hunter’s and gatherer’s life as a utopia: they think war was a rarity, that the male elders were praiseworthy without exception, that the old people belonged to a caring society and that most tribes or mini-nations continuously held their own land for 50,000 or more unbroken years. It is fair to suggest that these are all dubious claims.
Ancient Australia had its strong merits as well as its myths. We have to admire facets of its way of life. So long as the population was relatively low and droughts were short-lived, then the people’s supply of food was plentiful. They also inherited or developed a religion that intrigued scholars, who grappled with its mysteries. Its early inhabitants must have carried out marvellous feats, for they gradually explored the whole continent when it was much larger. The huge continent then embraced – before the mighty rising of the seas – what is now the main island of Papua New Guinea and its snow-capped alps as well as the present continent of Australia.

That banality was followed by this banality...

Ancient Australia had its strong merits as well as its myths and modern Australia today is among the privileged very few to claim the title of a true democracy. Picture: Darren England/AAP

That didn't quite look like the mob were claiming the title of a true democracy, but never mind, the very thought of anyone protesting about anything - even the cooking of the planet, the ultimate genocide - always sends the hive mind into a frenzy...

People in what is now PNG, compared with the people in what is now Australia, remained in touch with the outside world. One of their triumphs is little known. About 7000 years ago, in high and fertile terrain, they domesticated sugar cane and an early form of the banana. The outside world was ultimately the gainer, and still is.
Unfortunately, even in some official circles, a layer of make-believe now masks our early history. Australia is mischievously claimed to have been, 80,000 years ago, the world’s first democracy and a haven of peace. Incredibly a vast desert in the interior is now proclaimed to have been, in the long Aboriginal epoch, a fertile and rich agricultural province. These and other theories – now fed to schools by the author of the Dark Emu books – were publicly endorsed in parliament by his friend and admirer Anthony Albanese.
In essence, the invasion by the British was claimed to have destroyed a paradise and compensation must be paid. It is believed, however, by some observers that the Prime Minister would gain prestige if he withdrew his endorsement of this make-believe history of his land. Universities also would gain if they questioned, for the first time, some of the myths embedded in the eloquent Uluru Statement from the Heart.

So the bashing continued, as ritualised an event as snake-bashing day in Springfield, and with snaps of targets ...

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe claims the British invasion 'destroyed a paradise and compensation must be paid'.

The pond isn't going to get into all that, sheesh, better just to slumber on ...

Australia is usually condemned for its White Australia Policy, in force even before 1901. The policy was sometimes expressed in extreme language that is now embarrassing. Perspective, however, is missing. Today, China and many Asian nations, as is their right, simply refuse to admit foreigners and grant them citizenship.

And that's how the lizard Oz, which has taken on unofficially The Bulletin's official slogan, Australia for the white man, addresses this ...

Yeah, perspective is missing ...

But then Blainers always was fond of bashing furriners, and how it must agitate him to see the multicultural diversity that's come to pass, since long ago he first did his Pauline impression ...

On the pond plodded ...

Likewise in the years when Australians are depicted as racist, tens of thousands gave money to other nations in distress. They helped victims of the Irish famine in the 1840s, Lancashire mill workers impoverished by the American civil war in 1861, and victims of two Indian and two Chinese famines in the period from 1876 to 1901. For one disaster in which millions of Indians died, donations came from sources such as a Carlton-Melbourne football match crowd. Cash and food even came from several prisoners in Pentridge jail.
Other episodes of generosity were displayed by hundreds of thousands of Australians who in churches and Sunday schools gave staggering sums to build churches, schools and hospitals in New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, Fiji, Tonga, the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Nauru and, sometimes, China and coastal India.
Many Australian missionaries, male and female, also made personal sacrifices to spread, after early failures, their message to remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander townships. There, according to recent censuses, can be found a higher percentage of Christians than inhabit a typical suburb in our capital cities. And yet we forget that the more typical Aboriginal households now live in cities and big towns where so many own or are paying off their own homes.

The pond felt like donning a MAGA cap and going on a crime spree, knowing that a pardon would surely follow. 

Oops, A Captain Cook Statue in Randwick was vandalised and damaged overnight just two days ahead of Australia Day. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Ah well, if you don't mind a little shit in your Capitol building, a little rioting and disruption, and the odd bit of theft, you should expect people to emulate the standards celebrated by Faux Noise ...

On the pond laboured ...

In addition, Australia Day should deliver a powerful secular or economic message. The outside world gained enormously when the long isolation of this land and its Aboriginal people came to an end. Australian sheep of a superior breed eventually were yielding the wool that in most years helped sustain the million Europeans enduring a very cold winter. Similarly, a host of people in poor countries gained the chance to be born and remain alive, such were the fleets of grain ships arriving from Australia. In a favourable year, Australia now grows enough for its own 27 million people and enough for how many times that number inhabiting foreign lands?
It was only two years ago that China, suffering from drought in its drier north, was receiving more wheat and other grains from Australia than from any other nation. Most school students apparently are not taught that Australian foods, minerals, building materials, energy and other products are annually provided in vast quantities to the outside world. In contrast, for thousands of years ancient Australia provided virtually nothing.
There is another reason for celebrating a national day. Tributes can be paid to those who placed the life of their friends and neighbours above their own. While Anzac Day on April 25 honours heroes in past wars, it does not honour a large – even a remarkable – number of Australians who show bravery in time of peace.
In reports of the sensational bushfires in Los Angeles, one item seems to be missing – the brave actions of numerous volunteers who tried to fight the fires. Across the past 200 years a host of Australian volunteers, participating in acts of courage, died or suffered serious injuries while fighting bushfires.

At this point the pond wondered yet again why, if Australia delivered a message, it wasn't staged on the first day of the Australian federation, 1st January, and the answer, of course, is that was already a bloody holyday ... and what was really needed was an excuse for a long weekend, a piss up and a Sydney-centric view of the world emanating from Holt street.

Then the visual interruptions hit a real flag-waving low ...

Sky News host Caleb Bond discusses Hong Kong owned pub group Australian Venue Co’s “backflip on the backflip” with the recent decision to distance from Australia Day once more. “In December, Hong Kong owned pub group Australian Venue Co backflipped on its decision to boycott the celebrations of Australia Day,” Mr Bond said. “Now they have backflipped on the backflip.”

Could it get any more obnoxious or tedious? Perhaps the pond under-estimated Blainer's fading power to irritate ...

Australia Day can pay tribute to folk heroes. The worst civilian disaster in our history happened in August 1845 when a sailing ship from Liverpool crashed on to a reef off King Island, at the entrance to Bass Strait. More than 400 immigrants, including mothers and newborn babies, were drowned after the Cataraqui crashed on to the reef, the torn sails flapping on a mast. As only one passenger and eight sailors survived, no female voice was left to recall the acts of courage that must have taken place.
We can’t overlook the lads who, at Gundagai in June 1852, rescued people from the surging Murrumbidgee River. Survivors clung to trees, some for a day and longer, and at least 80 people were drowned in this, the deadliest flood so far in our history. In a bark canoe and a rowing boat, two of the local Aboriginal people rescued 69 of their fellow Australians.
Many individualists – generous in spirit – spent their working life in easing hardships of others. Caroline Chisholm, an ardent Catholic, helped thousands of female immigrants in the period from 1838 to 1866. Another of her projects was to erect roadside shelters in which heavily laden people walking to the goldfields in the 1850s could spend the night.

And the reptiles managed to dig up someone more noxious than Caleb, petulant Peta herself...

Sky News host Peta Credlin has discussed the “huge protest” planned for Sydney on Australia Day. “Some 30,000 activist and general ratbags set to disrupt the city,” Ms Credlin said. “We learnt today too that it's Victoria's new First Nations' Assembly that's encouraging this protesting, something the Premier was asked about today and failed to condemn.”

Why, if it's such a glorious democracy, with the long absent lord's right to dissent, are the reptiles always so agitated and so spiteful when anyone disagrees with them? 

Don't expect an answer from the chill Blain, attempting something of an Ergas ...

Australia is one of the oldest continuing democracies. That is worth remembering. Admittedly, ancient Athens was a path-finding democracy, but few of its people had the right to participate in vital state decisions and even then they had to be present in person at the place of debate. Naturally, its slaves had no say. In modern history the US was a wonder, emerging as a brave new democracy before the First Fleet reached Sydney. Yet later it still possessed a minority of slave states when most Australian colonies were displaying democratic innovations.
In 1856 South Australia and Victoria were the first places in the world to use the secret ballot on election day. When seven years later Abraham Lincoln, on the battlefield at Gettysburg, made his eloquent affirmation that democracy was “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, he must have known a favourable version of government was already in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. Slavery in the US was not abolished until two years after Lincoln’s oration.
Aboriginal people took part in these electoral reforms. Alas, they were deprived initially of certain elementary rights and freedoms, and it is still a grievance, understandably. In the three most populous Australian colonies, however, many Aboriginal men had the right to vote when few white men had that right in Britain.
There is yet another surprise. Most Aboriginal women living in the main districts of what is now South Australia exercised the right to vote in 1896. That was before any women, black or white, had that right in New York, Chicago or London.
The new Commonwealth of Australia, formed in 1901, soon led the world in granting certain political rights to women. Though New Zealand is rightly acclaimed as the first country to grant women the vote, Australia went a step further in the federal election of 1903. It became the first country to grant women the rights to vote and to stand for parliament.

Time for some visual tokenism? Not really, Smoking ceremony are increasingly being used at civic and sporting events Picture: Getty Images

What a pathetic, cheap arsed, stock photo image ... about as hideous a way to celebrate any kind of ceremony as the reptiles could manage ...

...but a fair reflection of the standard of insight in the text ...

In the world today, democracies are in a minority. The typical member nation of the UN is not a real democracy and shows no signs of becoming one. The Economist Intelligence Unit compiles a democracy index that lists 167 nations and assigns to each a definite place on a ladder of democracies. Only 8 per cent of the world’s population live in true democracies and Australians share that privilege. The public is not aware of that legitimate source of pride.
Melbourne is abandoning its street march this Australia Day. Here is a city, the nation’s first federal capital, spectacularly ignorant of its own history.
Do politicians know how important Australia is in the history of democracy? Our welcome to country was perhaps a useful experiment but can be challenged. Those authoritarian personages, the Indigenous elders who presided during tens of thousands of years, are paraded before us as being virtually free from faults. A ceremony so undemocratic should be rewritten or abandoned.
This could be the first Australia Day since 1917 – the wartime year of the tense conscription debate – when religion is an explosive topic. In recent months, more attacks – by graffiti or explosives or incendiary devices – have been made on Australia’s synagogues and other Jewish possessions than in any previous year. Yet in proportion to population, the Jews have contributed to Australian scholarship, politics, the law and big business more than has any other ethnic group or religion.

Yes, he had to go there ...

Ahead of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camp Auschwitz, Holocaust survivors are voicing their fears over the rise of anti-Semitism and are urging people to stand up against it. Olivia Zollino reports.

But the pond has already covered that matter, thanks to Uncle Leon ...

See? No need to voice any fears, everything's for the best in the world of Uncle Leon, King Donald I and Faux Noise. Can we get a salute just to confirm it?

And with that Blainers at last bumbled to a conclusion ...

Within certain circles a contempt for Jews probably far exceeds the peaks of Catholic-Protestant hostilities during any one decade in the period 1840 to 1970. The burning or bombing of churches – so far as I know – was not an episode in that rivalry. One lesson of our history, to be remembered on Australia Day, is that social cohesion should normally be prized.
Professor Walter Murdoch was a West Australian who in old age offered us many words of wisdom. On March 7, 1964, he wrote in the afternoon Melbourne Herald: “Quickly the night wind sweeps us away, and the traces of us. We serve the purposes of the day, and if we have served that purpose faithfully, we must be content to be forgotten tomorrow.”
Clearly he understood that a nation should remember those – the low and the high – who learned from its failures as well as those who brought it success. The creation of a nation and its generations of worthwhile people should not be forgotten. That is another major reason in favour of celebrating Australia Day.
Geoffrey Blainey has written 40 books including A Short History of the World and The Story of Australia’s People.

The pond never thought it would celebrate, but come 28th January the torpor of the holyday season will end, and then it will be revealed how many of the reptiles lingered in the hive mind, and how many did a seasonal Killer Creighton ... 

...and then it will be back to mindless reptile busyness, while the pond will daily inclined to be out to lunch ...