In which the pond tries to look at events in the world outside the lizard Oz, but has to settle for the Angelic one and the reptile editorialist ...

 

These days the pond entertains itself by noting what the reptiles at the lizard Oz conspicuously fail to highlight in the digital edition ...

The most notable exclusion from top of the lizard Oz digital world, ma? 

Surely that the United States is about to inaugurate a convicted felon as president ...

In the reptile universe, if it's disappeared to the cornfield, it doesn't exist, perhaps never existed ...

So you won't find any mention of matters featured in Andrew King's and David Karoly's piece for The Conversation, As Los Angeles combusts, 2024 is declared Earth's hottest on record.

In short, 1.5°C is done and dusted, already a museum piece, 2°C might be a stretch, and things will keep hotting up, though perhaps not so much this year ...

For further reading, see Rebecca Solnit in The Graudian, The chronicle of a fire foretold ...

Solnit tried to offer some hope, a way to move from despair to possibility ...

Catastrophic fire erases what was there before. So does forgetting. Memory is a resource for facing the future; it’s equipment for imagining, planning, preparing. Forgetting creates terrible vulnerabilities to the return of foreseen disasters, to misinformation (including Trump’s social media blasts blaming Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom for the fires), and vulnerability to unrealistic expectations – including that each disaster at least since Hurricane Katrina will be the “wake-up call” that will change everything. “Weather can’t do the work of politics,” declares Daniel Aldana Cohen, a climate sociologist in a study of New York City’s response to 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. We cannot know the future, but remembering the past with care and accuracy equips us to navigate it.
That past includes decades of warnings from climate scientists that we are heading into a more turbulent and destructive era. They and climate activists have offered not just warnings but clear knowledge of what to do to limit how bad it gets. We are deciding whether or not to act on that knowledge now, including with who we elect and what we support. We know that the future is being reshaped by human-caused climate change, and we do know exactly what to do about it and who is preventing us from doing it. We are often urged to be prepared for our local disaster, be it blizzard, earthquake, hurricane or fire, but no personal preparation can compensate for the lack of the collective preparation that is meaningful international climate action. The current fires are reminders of the costs of forgetting.

Sadly, the pond remains stuck in the valley of despair, what with a convicted felon and climate science denialist soon to take the throne ...

As for the second eleven the reptiles fielded this day, it's notable how the lizard Oz has increasingly turned racist and full Zionist, amazing considering where they started from ...

The pond isn't going to encourage the racism imported with Brendan O'Neill, in what has become a most unsavoury assault. 

There are levels and bevels to all that which are a hang over from Britain's colonial past, and the pond made the mistake of listening to James O'Brien asking Has Robert Jenrick 'gone full Tommy Robinson'?

Nor is the pond going to bother with garrulous Gemma, going full Zionist, what with news that the Gaza genocide might be bigger than previously reported ... perhaps some 64,000, according to Lancet, via Politico ...

You won't find that report in the lizard Oz.

And so back to that list of other things not noted by the reptiles ... 

Perhaps it's because there are so many legal matters out there that the reptiles daily turn into stunned mullets. It certainly makes it hard for the pond to keep track. There are so many legal actions, so much fun  to be found.. 

There was Liz trying to escape the overwhelming stench of a rotting lettuce, with a stern legal letter, beyond the valley of the richly comical ...see Hugh Muir's‘Stop saying I crashed the economy,’ says Liz Truss. Is it possible to gaslight an entire country? in the Graudian.

See the Emeritus Chairman and his underlings trying to duck legal action, and coming up short ... Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. must face 2020 election defamation lawsuit, appeals court rules.

In its ruling Thursday, the unanimous New York appeals court cited, in part, similar legal findings from the Delaware judge who oversaw a related case brought by Dominion Voting Systems over Fox’s airing of 2020 election lies. Fox paid more than $787 million to settle that lawsuit in 2023, in the largest publicly known defamation settlement in US history.
“Here, consistent with the Dominion decisions, we find that the allegations in the first amended complaint relating to Fox Corporation directing the other defendants to undertake a disinformation campaign… sufficiently allege Fox Corporation’s ‘direct liability’ for the challenged defamatory statements,” the New York appellate ruling said.

And that's just a few of the novelty items. There was Mike Lindell, enjoying his day in court, Mike Lindell's MyPillow ordered to pay DHL nearly $778,000 for unpaid bills, legal costs. Mike Lindell is also embroiled a number of other lawsuits, including two involving voting machine companies and another involving a software engineer who debunked his 2020 election claims.

Sheesh, first kill all the litigants and then we can get on with the lawyers.

The pond must also give up on cheerful arguments designed to provoke a bar room brawl amongst Nazis ... 

This yarn featuring Uncle Leon was given a run in Wired, Elon Musk and Far-Right German Leader Agree ‘Hitler Was a Communist’, and then the Beast juiced it up, Elon Musk and Far-Right German Leader Push Wild Hitler Theory:

What was a surprise, according to Wired, was how “deeply weird” the conversation got. And among the strangest lines to come out of the chin wag was that Musk and Weidel reckon Hitler, the fascist dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, was in fact a communist.
However, on day one of coming to power, Hitler banned the Communist Party of Germany.
Hitler’s autobiography— Mein Kampf—is packed full of anti-communist views. In it, he encouraged nationalism and anti-communism. Hitler even outlawed socialism, and executed socialists and communists en masse. In 1933, the Dachau concentration camp held socialists and leftists exclusively.
He also invaded the communist flag-bearer, the Soviet Union, in June 1941. In the book, Hitler also presents himself as the leader of the extreme right and also rails against Marxism, which he believed was a Jewish conspiracy with designs on weakening the “Aryan race” and Germany.
“[Hitler] was a communist, and he considered himself as a socialist,” Weidel said, in response to Musk probing links between the AfD and Nazism reported on in the press. Scandal-plagued former AfD EU pick Maximilian Krah told journalists in May last year that SS members weren’t automatically “criminals.” The AfD has also been accused of clandestine meetings where mass deportation of non ethnic Germans, including citizens, was discussed.
“The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right[-wing] and conservative, he was exactly the opposite,” Weidel said. “He wasn’t a conservative, he wasn’t a libertarian, he was a communist, socialist guy, and we are the opposite.”

Then for more low comedy there was the ongoing saga of quisling, lickspittle fellow travelling sell out Morning Joe, ‘Morning Joe’ Panelist ‘Cooks’ Scarborough for Kissing-Up to Trump at Mar-a-Lago

...Finally able to speak freely, Steele concluded: “But, Joe, I’m just saying my main point is, everybody is looking at this from a one-way perspective; how we need to approach Donald Trump. How is he approaching us? The man wants to lock up citizens, the man wants to turn the government against them, how are we supposed to respond to that? Are we supposed to be civil?”
On X, commentators sided heavily with Steele. “Thank you Michael Steele - putting them in their place,” one user wrote. Another added: “Michael Steele and Joe Scarborough goin at it this morning on Morning Joe. Damn good conversation. I’m with Michael Steele on this one.”
A third said Scarborough was “condescending,” with a fourth adding: “Damn!!!! @MichaelSteele COOKED @JoeNBC and Mika. Keep swinging Michael!”

All the fun's anywhere but the lizard Oz, but inevitably the pond must turn back to the calm waters of the lizard Oz. 

Relax, the pond meant "calm" in Humpty Dumpty style to mean turbulent, frothing and foaming spray crashing on assorted rocks ...

Luckily the pond could avoid the racism and the rampant Zionism by plunging into delusion with the Angelic one, offering Kids need to learn virtues of character, How much pathologising is a manifestation of real mental and emotional turmoil in children – or their parents?

The reptiles attached a bog standard stock snap as their opening gambit, Is little Johnny really suffering from ADHD, or sleep deprivation from staying up till 2am to play video games? Picture: istock

Sheesh, not the old video game routine ... kids, if you want to learn the virtues of character, emulate a reptile hero ...

You could make a fortune... or you could learn how to lower your intelligence by reading the Angelic one ...

The other day I opened the newspaper and on the front page was a story that might have come as a revelation to some people: the news that anxiety in children is not necessarily a pathological problem. Who would have thought it?
Anxiety is just, well, being anxious. To many of us, still brushing off the coal dust from bringing up our own children, and now observing our grandchildren, this news seems to fall into the “bleeding obvious” category. But what is not obvious is why the pathologising of any “negative” emotion in a child or adult is so prevalent. An extreme example is depression, which has gone from “I’m depressed today”, to “I have depression”, and this phenomenon is affecting children, adolescents and young adults too in great numbers.

Yes, it's another, "why don't they just harden the fuck up" sermon, from the school of getting up at 4 am to eat a healthy bit of tar and coal before going off to salt mine for a 24 hour day ...

So why is this happening when children have more attention and care lavished on them than ever before? How much pathologising is a manifestation of real mental and emotional turmoil in children – or their parents? More simply, is little Johnny really suffering from ADHD, or sleep deprivation from staying up till 2am to play video games? However, most important is whether, by encouraging this pathologising and the behaviours that accompany it, we are setting children up for a terrible adult fall.
The reasons for these problems are many, but we should think about the changes in the society in which we live, and in the structure of the family. We have smaller families than ever before; parents are older and less experienced with children. Many children are not living with both parents. The divorce rate has plateaued but the out-of-wedlock birthrate in Australia is now over 40 per cent.
Add to that, children are now very institutionalised. Many have been in childcare since infancy, they have to do formal “learning” from an early age, and parents are increasingly relying on the institutions, rather than their own instincts, to sort out ordinary problems. One teacher I know has told me she is heartily sick of parents wanting advice on problems outside the education of the children, behavioural problems in the parental realm, not the teacher’s, and ingrained poor behaviour is almost the norm in Australian classrooms. Consequently, teachers and parents are only too happy to medicalise problems. It switches the onus from parents to the “condition”. Hence half the kids in any classroom, especially the boys, are on Ritalin.

There is a lot of rich comedy in this, not least the notion of a fundamentalist tyke deploring the way that children are now very institutionalised ...but then cultists have never had a sense of irony ...

Then the Angelic one turned to an "expert" ... as reptiles are wont to do ...

Leonard Sax is a famous American physician and psychologist, and author of several books about children, including Why Gender Matters and his 2016 The Collapse of Parenting, reissued last year. His theme is the transfer of authority from parents to children. Every civilisation has been based on parental authority, and the most reliable predictor of good adult outcomes is developing self-control in childhood. The paradox now is that parents think they are doing the right thing by transferring their authority to the child. This is because the family and the authority of parents are being subsumed into a toxic culture, “the culture of disrespect”. This means something much bigger than kids not respecting adults.
Sax gives startling examples from experience as a doctor, from food used as a controlling weapon, especially by adolescent girls, to a six-year-old with a sore throat who wouldn’t open her mouth but stated, borrowing from the pro-choice mantra, “my body, my choice”. It would have been funny, except she was defended by her mother. Sax is right when he says parents now think it is virtuous to let kids decide for themselves. I have seen this myself from extreme examples like the preverbal two-year-old who had to nod yes or no to new shoes, to a prepubescent teen who simply decided he was too unwell to go on the school camp. Children do not need constant “validation”. This myth is one factor that has resulted in “status uncertainty” – parents who are no longer confident about asserting authority.

This at least gave the pond a reason to bring Adolf back into the conversation. 

Sax is notorious for his theory that Adolf was a Jew ... inter alia:

In May 2019, Sax published an article “Aus den Gemeinden von Burgenland: Revisiting the question of Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather” which attempts to provide evidence for the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Hitler had Jewish ancestry and that was the reason for his anti-Semitism... 
Historians have condemned Sax’s motive and conclusions from his findings. British historian Richard J. Evans stated, “Even if there were Jews living in Graz in the 1830s, at the time when Adolf Hitler’s father Alois was born, this does not prove anything at all about the identity of Hitler’s paternal grandfather.” And, that, “There is no contemporary evidence that Hitler’s mother was ever in Graz, or that there was a Jewish family called Frankenberger living there. There was a family in Graz called Frankenreiter but it was not Jewish. No correspondence between Hitler’s father or paternal grandmother has ever been found. Nor is there any evidence for Frank’s claim that Hitler’s half-nephew knew about it and was blackmailing Hitler, as Frank claimed.” With regard to Sax’s comments about his findings, Evans remarked, “Some people have found his deep and murderous anti-Semitism hard to explain unless there were personal motives behind it. This seems to be the motivation for Dr. Leonard Sax, a psychiatrist, not an historian, making his claims”.

So he was a Jewish Commie swine after all ...

Meanwhile, back with the Angelic one, off to Narnia with the pixies or that lion ...

So, what is the line between being authoritative and authoritarian? Perhaps to even ask the question, as CS Lewis said, means we are worrying about the danger to which we are least prone. We live in a permissive age so we are worried about a whole lot of authoritarian stuff. No one hits their children now. That is not the danger now. The danger is going to the other extreme. Why? Because the whole cultural movement is going in that permissive direction.
Sax points to research done at UCLA quantifying the most popular TV shows watched by children and adolescents from 1957 to early this century, and the subtle change in messages shift from do the right thing, be a good friend, family togetherness and so on, to the win-at-all-costs message of Survivor and American Idol. Meanwhile, social media came in and the most important thing is many likes and, ultimately, fame. Fame became a value of itself, and a cult. So, like Justin Bieber, the young think “the world will belong to me”.

Oh sheesh, it's not comic books or the radio, it's the telly and social media, and that stock photo was a red herring, and the pond had gone to the trouble to dig up Playing Video Games Has an Unexpected Effect on Kids' IQ, Says Study ...

"Our results support the claim that screen time generally doesn't impair children's cognitive abilities, and that playing video games can actually help boost intelligence," neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden said in 2022 when the study was published.
As the researchers note, this is not the first study to suggest that there could be a link between the time that kids spend gaming and the development of their cognitive abilities – and there seem to be other associated benefits from video games, too.

Never mind, besides hardening the fuck up, young 'uns need to be Xian ...

But it won’t. And here is the source of real mental illness in young adults – “the Great Disappointment”. The culture builds into the notions “you can be anything you want to be”, “work hard and your dreams will come true”. This stuff is written on walls in schools now. It is especially the mantra for girls. “You too can be the next whoever.” As Sax says: “Christianity understands the Great Disappointment. Modern culture does not. The result in many young adults is bottomless depression, suicide and self-harm.” The best predictor of happiness is the quality of your personal relationships and that comes from character. We need to teach the real virtues of character, including self-control, to children if we want them to be healthy, wealthy and, most importantly, happy adults.

Yes, kiddies, get yourself a dinkum, decent role model and all will be well ...

Finally, for a bonus, the pond held prattling Polonius in reserve for his usual meditative Sunday gig, and turned to the lizard Oz editorialist, going full paranoid in Growing sense we live in dangerous times for world, Australia must create the capacity, and fast, to defend ourselves in a world where our geographic isolation no longer protects us from great powers.

There was no illustration, so perhaps the pond could help out with this graph taken from The Daily Show ...

There was a follow-up graph showing that all of his victims had accused King Donald I of being Adolf ...

It did wonders for the pond's anxiety attacks and paranoia.

Sorry, the pond keeps trying to amuse itself, when we live in dangerous times, and the lizard Oz provides potted summaries of all the dangers ...

History briefly ended for Australia when the US won the Cold War. For a while we were free of the grim reality that great powers always fight each other for territory and trade, that wars wash over into terrorist conflicts based on ideologies and ethnicity. But history has resumed normal transmission, with wars in Europe and the Middle East and, as David Kilkullen writes in Inquirer, there is a “resurgence of terrorism, jihadist and homegrown, in the US, Europe and elsewhere”.

He joins Peter Jennings and Michael Pezzullo in the paper in setting out the strategic context and challenges for Australia in a world where we are a nation on the frontline, where China projects power in the air, at sea and in cyberspace. “The multidimensional competition between mainland China and the US is accelerating,” Dr Kilkullen warns. As for the optimistic assumption that because such a conflict has not happened yet it won’t, Mr Pezzullo points out that past and present stability is no predictor of the future, that the world can change in days – as it just did for the long-time Assad dictatorship in Syria. For Australia, a “gradual and then sudden” establishment of Chinese hegemony and a US withdrawal from our region, by choice or military defeat, would “be the most adverse geopolitical occurrence in our history”.

Look, surely it's a lot simpler ... there's just been a minor change to the cast of baddies ...

The reptiles were determined to ignore the Angelic one and have a deep anxiety attack, a full on assault of the vapours ...

And so Australia must create the capacity, and fast, to defend ourselves in a world where our geographic isolation no longer protects us from great powers. But Mr Jennings warns we are a long way short of being able to do that. The Australian Defence Force is undergunned and understaffed, with the government accepting weakness now as it plans for the 2030s. This could be way too late if push comes to shooting shove sooner rather than later. Mr Jennings warns that Australian bases and what he understatedly describes as “population centres” are in range of Chinese missiles. It is also nonsense to assume this cannot happen. For a start, he predicts that if China attacked and the US defended Taiwan the war would expand as the Chinese used the opportunity to extend their operational control. One way or another, Mr Jennings warns, “a moment will come when diplomatic promises won’t be enough to secure Australia’s interests. China will continue searching for ways to establish a permanent military presence in the Pacific”. And if that moment comes in 2025 we will not be, cannot be, ready. “Australia’s current defence and security performance falls a long way short of what is needed. I fear that 2025 will test us severely on multiple security fronts. Nothing suggests we will respond well,” he writes.

But we have a valiant ally, ready to tackle the hard issues ...

Th reptiles were inconsolable ...

Neither is Mr Pezzullo a sunny optimist. “A hegemonic China”, unchallenged in the Pacific by an isolationist US, “would be for Australia a more demanding overlord than Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or Soviet Russia would have been had any one of them managed to achieve mastery in Eurasia,” he warns. But his realpolitik is based on working with what we can do for ourselves, “intensifying and accelerating our military, civil defence and national cyber defence preparations” and working with our neighbours. On this front, he suggests, Australia’s clear stance against China dominating the Pacific creates credibility, which we should use to unite our neighbours against the common threat, not in a multistate alliance but certainly a commitment to help if China attacked.

These three experts set out hard options for tough times that require much more money for defence, not only to protect our country but to show our friends and warn China that Australia will stand up. It will not be an easy sell with voters Labor wants to keep. The Greens are adamant against AUKUS, arguing the National Disability Insurance Scheme is what needs funding. Former prime minister Paul Keating told the ABC last August that China “has no strategic designs upon Australia”, which undoubtedly is true in that the People’s Liberation Army is not set to invade. But undeterred China could control the seas around us, cutting fuel supplies, controlling trade routes. To its credit the Labor government is standing firm on the Coalition’s creation of AUKUS and regularly announces new defence expenditure. Long-range missiles for the navy the other week, more Bushmaster infantry fighting vehicles for the army this. It’s nowhere near enough to meet the strategic threats Mr Jennings and Mr Pezzullo set out but it demonstrates that at least there is a sense that we live in dangerous times and that just because there are no immediate threats to our national security now there could be – and soon.

Meanwhile, on another planet, one rarely mentioned, noted or observed by any of the reptile "experts" ... as they valiantly attempted to devise new ways to blow shit up, when the shit has already hit the fan.