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 ...