In which the Caterist emulates zombies in snow and the Major returns to litter the intertubes ...

Today is the beginning of incessant gloating by incessantly stupid lizard Oz reptiles, aligning themselves with a deeply stupid man, no matter what barking mad whim or notion he comes up with.

Right at the bottom there was a fresh alarum, about the censor seeking 'cancel culture' powers, a classic lizard Oz beat up, but the main joy was the reptiles beating along to the rhythms of DJ King Donald I ... though strangely they missed out on the most exciting beat, a new TikTok dance craze ...

Over on the extreme far right was the usual motley mob ...

There's no doubt immense comedy could be found in the bouffant one's piece about Xians tackling an alleged crisis with force, heart and logic, given the way that Xianity has for thousands of years set a certain tone.

There's no need to look further than the wiki listing Martin Luther and antisemitism:

• "First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools ... This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians ..."
• "Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed."
• "Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them."
• "Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb ..."
• "Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside ..."
• "Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them ..."

And so on and on, and as for Anthony Bergin, fine, apply your security checks, but given what the pond's been reading lately (see below), Australia shouldn't allow anyone from Israel to turn up here without the most stringent security checks.

Never mind, it's the dawning of King Donald, and for that the pond must turn to reliable reptile regulars to celebrate ...

There are going to be four more years of this, with the Caterist showing that when it comes to Zuck being a suck, the Caterist also knows a thing or two about sucking...

Trump the catalyst for net-zero retreat, Corporate America has been quick to adapt to the changing political environment. Net-zero 2050 has become passe.

True to form, the Caterist embraces the tangerine tyrant's notion that cold means that there's no global warming ...

Snow piled up on the West Front of the US Capitol building, where the presidential inauguration traditionally takes place. Picture: AFP

It's impossible to argue with this level of stupidity ...

A bone-chilling burst of polar air swept south from Canada into the heart of the US across the weekend, prompting the presidential inauguration ceremony on Monday (Tuesday AEDT) to be moved indoors for the first time in 40 years.
For Americans seeking signs of a return to the relative sanity of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, it was a welcome omen.
On the day of Reagan’s second inauguration in 1985, long before global warming became a thing, the temperature in Washington hovered around minus 14C. Monday’s forecast maximum is minus 6C.
It would be premature to proclaim that Donald Trump has stopped global warming any more than he has yet brought peace to the Middle East.
However, Trump’s election has noticeably changed the climate of the energy policy debate, and the consequences will be felt worldwide.

It's the triumphalism that is more nauseating than the attempt to deny the science and its implications...

Corporate America is preparing for a bonfire of climate regulations within days of Trump’s resumption of office. Trump has pledged to cut energy costs by 50 per cent in his first year by easing fugitive emissions restrictions on oil and gas, opening federal land for fracking, and scrapping the tough new standards for coal-fired power plants and newly built gas generation introduced in 2024 by the Biden administration.
CNN presenters describe this disparagingly as the “Drill baby, drill!” approach. Less partisan observers would interpret it as a welcome return to the supply-side economics that underpinned Reagan-era prosperity. The secret to reducing the cost of energy is simply to produce more of it. As in Australia, the moral debate about climate change in the US is a proxy war for something far less high-minded.

The reptiles decided a snap with the lighting from below produced the appropriate sense of threat ...

US president-elect Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump watch fireworks during a reception in his honour on January 18. Picture: AFP

Dear sweet long absent lord, it's as if the Soviet Union never went away, but if we're in a celebratory mood, why not celebrate with a suitably American reference to King Donald and his current first lady?

Meanwhile, the Caterist was busy outlining splendid ways to fuck the planet ...

Americans are divided not by ideology but by investment portfolios. Stocks in the oil, gas and nuclear sectors have risen ahead of Trump’s inauguration while the value of investments in renewable energy has fallen.
Corporate America has been quick to adapt to the changing political environment. Net-zero 2050 has become passe.
Six of the largest banks in the US – Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo – read the wind and announced they would be withdrawing from the UN-sponsored Net-Zero Banking Alliance.
And BlackRock announced that it was pulling out of a similar UN-sponsored climate initiative, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative.
The collapse of the green energy finance cartel will affect the flow of global capital. The difficulties of funding renewable energy projects will increase while banks will become more sympathetic to other technology, particularly nuclear.
Trump told a press conference at Mar-a-Lago early this month: “We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built.” Wind turbines “turn to garbage” after a time and “litter” the country, he said, adding that the death of whales from offshore wind development was a proven fact. Wind energy was, he continued, “the most expensive energy ever; many, many times more expensive than clean natural gas”.
It was the death knell for the offshore wind sector and for onshore projects on federal land.
While the construction of turbines on private land is beyond the reach of a presidential decree, their financial viability will be weakened by the suspension of tax credits.
Trump has promised to rescind unspent money allocated under Biden’s Green New Deal, aka the Inflation Reduction Act, or the Green New Scam as the president-elect called it recently.
In his first term, Trump took several months to announce the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement as he dealt with resistance from his advisers and some cabinet members. This time, the withdrawal could be decreed as soon as day one.
It is a measure in part of Trump’s increased stature. It also gauges how far the global energy and climate debate has shifted in the intervening four years. The disruption of gas supplies caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the realisation that reducing carbon emissions is considerably harder than setting targets has generated buyers’ remorse about the net zero by 2050 agreement, made in the heady atmosphere of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gathering in 2015 in one of the more pleasant capitals.

That windmills thingie is down there with sharks and Hannibal Lecter, but there's no point arguing with a clown enjoying the circus, even if the celebration has shifted inside to avoid problems with crowd size ...

Preparation work inside the US Capitol Rotunda ahead of president-elect Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony. Picture: Getty Images

As advised, the pond has no intention arguing ... all that needs to be noted is the epic suckery and the triumphalism ...

Net-zero-by-2050 true believers no doubt will play down the importance of the US withdrawal, noting it will be almost alone in the developed world.
They miss the point. The US withdrawal will mean the world’s top four carbon emitters – China, the US, India and Russia – responsible for 60 per cent of emissions, will not be bound by the agreement.
Sooner or later, countries such as Australia will get around to discussing why we should bother. Indeed, some prominent members of the Coalition, particularly in the Nationals, are already asking that question.
In Europe, backsliders are kept in check by the EU bureaucratic industrial complex in Brussels that, increasingly, makes the big decisions on economic, fiscal and immigration policy. Yet tensions are increasing between renewables-only mendicants, notably Germany, and the European nations that shoulder the burden of keeping the European grid alive when Germany’s wind turbines go into a funk.
In December 2024, Sweden’s Deputy Prime Minister and Energy Minister  Ebba Busch signalled her loss of patience with the Germans, pointing out the defects of the target-driven approach adopted by the European Commission and the IPCC.
“Is it more important to have a specific target for renewables where you can tamper with statistics, for example, by closing down nuclear power plants, or is the main target fossil-free and clean energy production?” she asked journalists during a break in a meeting of energy ministers in Brussels. “No willpower in the world can override the basic rules of physics, not even Dr Robert Habeck.”
Habeck is the German Vice-Chancellor and Economic Affairs and Climate Action Minister.
Sooner or later, Australia will have to confront the new realities of the climate debate and recognise that a transition to a net-zero economy cannot conceivably be achieved in the next 25 years, and probably not in the next 50.
We must recognise that a target-driven policy, inevitably constrained by economic and engineering reality, is empowering bureaucrats who are crippling our economy, eroding our competitive advantage, undermining fiscal stability and slashing future prosperity.
Countless billions of dollars in capital have been assigned to subprime schemes of dubious worth rather than being invested in more productive pursuits.
Just as Reagan’s presidency set an example for Western nations to break away from the destructive economic orthodoxies of his day, Trump may be the catalyst for the global restoration of energy common sense.

Or the fucking of the planet, whatever ...

Those LA fires and their intensity? So quickly forgotten ...

And so to the Major, returning this day, and the pond suddenly realised how pleasant it was not to have the Major banging away during the summer break.

The Major began his return in his usual grandiose way ...

Journos fail to grasp basic terror truths, Journalists often misunderstand the point of terrorism. Islamist attacks in Western countries are designed to show young Muslims that the West cares more for white victims than it does for Muslim victims in Islamic countries.

He proceeded immediately to his first lie, embedded in his opening snap.

Palestinian children gather to receive food aid in the central Gaza Strip. Bad reporting has alleged Israel is deliberately starving Gazans. Picture: AFP

Bad reporting? Such a bald-faced lie, given the way that Israel deliberately halted or made any form of aid hard to access in Gaza ...

But then the Major is an experienced liar, and all that endless talk about the suffering in Gaza can now be quickly forgotten ...

The Major was also imbued with a sense of triumphalism, as well as an ability to go the gigantic suck ...

The inauguration of president-elect Donald Trump on Monday and Israel’s military success against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran indicate parts of the Western world are waking up to the realities of power.
In much of the West the celebration of feelings over facts in everything from gender and the media to international diplomacy has been driven by a 21st century take on Marxist thought.
Rather than focus on material improvement for the working class, this politics is the province of upper middle class professionals who prioritise the imagined right of individuals never to feel offended. Hence men can be women and Islamist terrorists can be progressives even if they subjugate women and murder homosexuals.
The election of Trump has sent the world a message. Voters prize common sense. They are OK with polite tolerance but not when it damages their own societies.
They want Trump to “Make America Great Again’’ because they saw Joe Biden and Barack Obama draw lines in the sand with authoritarian dictators who ignored the most powerful nation in history because they did not fear its leaders.

With a sublime lack of irony, the reptiles featured King Donald in jail bird pose, using the same lighting style featured above in that Soviet-style snap ...

The election of Trump has sent the world a message. Voters prize common sense. Picture: Supplied

Yep, that's sent the world a messasge.

That's why the pond did enjoy that Colbert sight gag, evoking the spirit of nightmares and ghost story-telling of the kind enjoyed before bedtime in Tamworth ...

On with the Major, and the pond now must confess to an ulterior motive, given that the pond was over the Major before he started ...

This is not just about wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Think the red-line ultimatum Obama issued against former president Bashar al-Assad in Syria in August 2012 if he used chemical weapons against his own people. He did so a year later.
In the years after the 2001 al-Qa’ida attacks in New York and Washington and the 2002 Bali bombings, much discussion in newspapers such as this one centred on the nature of tolerance. Should a tolerant society such as Australia’s allow the extreme intolerance of Islamist radicals?
In the self-consciously progressive left media – the old Fairfax papers – the discussion was less clear-eyed.
Was the West betraying its own democratic ideals by, for example, imprisoning Islamists at Guantanamo Bay while they were being questioned without having received a fair trial?
Was the West to blame for Islamist attacks on Western targets because it was more concerned with Middle Eastern oil than Middle Eastern social conditions?
This column called this “the root causes” view in a piece published on October 14, 2023, about the October 7 pogrom in southern Israel. In this view, Western victims of Islamic terror, whether in Israel, the US, Bali or Paris, bring terror on themselves because they do not recognise the problems of the Islamic world.
Never mind much of the Islamic world, particularly the Arab world, is ruled by some of the richest, most repressive leaders on Earth who privately support Islamist terror with oil money. And don’t forget the open anti-Semitism of many of the Arab world’s leaders, journalists and intellectuals who quote the Koran to justify murdering Jews.
Today in parts of Australia’s political left, the “root causes” view has morphed into outright sympathy for Islamism. Uni students praise Osama bin Laden’s manifesto, many support the October 7 slaughter of 1200 innocent Israeli civilians and decry Israel, one of the rare countries in the Middle East where women and gays are safe.
The UN, with 56 Muslim majority country members – and affiliated NGOs such as the World Health Organisation – openly run interference for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. The Western left follows.
Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah has this month repeated several false claims that Israel attacked civilians at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza and wrongfully imprisoned its director, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya. Some posts about Safiya imply he is a saintly figure, yet he is a Hamas colonel.

At this point the reptiles interrupted the Major with a snap ... Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah speaks at a pro Palestine protest at Macquarie University in Sydney. Picture: Richard Dobson

And so to the pond's ulterior motive. The New Yorker recently ran an excellent profile by Ruth Margalit, dubbingYinon Magal as Israel's Tucker Carlson ...

Netanyahu’s Media Poison Machine, The talk-show host Yinon Magal is at the center of a campaign to protect the Prime Minister and destroy the opposition. (outside the paywall in an archive here).

You won't ever read any of this sort of coverage in the lizard Oz.

The Major shows a major desire to be part of Netanyahu's media poison machine, but he's a rank amateur up against the professionals ...

...On “The Patriots,” the discussion of the war alternates between triumphal and venomous. Moshe Feiglin, a former member of the Knesset, said, soon after the attacks, “If the goal of this operation is not destruction, conquest, eviction, and settlement, then we haven’t done a thing!”A few weeks later, a Likud lawmaker named Keti Shitrit said, “If you ask me personally . . . I flatten Gaza, I have no sentiments.” Last February, Fleischmann said of civilians in Gaza, “I think the more humane solution is to starve them.” Magal himself suggested, in June, “Wipe those people out. As far as I’m concerned, let five hundred civilians remain there.” Until recently, the home page of Channel 14’s Web site kept a running tally of Palestinian casualties, including women and children, with the headline “Terrorists we eliminated.”
Since the war began, participants in Channel 14’s shows have called at least fifty times for the military to carry out genocide in Gaza, according to Israeli nonprofits that monitor the broadcasts. In September, the groups—the Democratic Bloc, Zulat, and the Association for Fair Regulation—filed a complaint with the attorney general against the station. Michael Sfard, a human-rights attorney who represents them, said that the complaint was part of a larger story, “about an Israeli network that has turned into a platform for incitement to war crimes at a time of war, and that is closely backed and supported by the Prime Minister and his allies.”

And so on and on ... there's a lot more at source.

Meanwhile, the Major poison machine rambled on ...

Melanie Phillips on Substack on January 1 referred to a then 12-month-old report in The Times of Israel quoting the hospital’s former director, Ahmad Kahlot, admitting Hamas had offices in the hospital. Kahlot said he had been a lieutenant colonel with Hamas since 2010. He said 16 staff members were part of the organisation’s Al-Qassam terror organisation. Phillips quoted a Palestinian news site referring to Dr Safiya as a colonel.
Links between Hamas and UN-supported education, aid and medical facilities in Gaza have been known for years. The UN investigated links between Hamas and UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency) as far back as 2014.
Politicians should not be surprised at the rise in anti-Semitism in the West: the media casually reports Israeli military actions against embedded Hamas forces in hospitals and schools as if Israel is deliberately targeting children and the sick.
Just as bad has been reporting alleging Israel is deliberately starving Gazans. Never mind that in no other conflict would the party first attacked be held responsible for feeding the civilian population of its attacker. This column reported on April 7 last year that Israel’s aid convoys into Gaza had reached pre-war levels, even though much of the media was lazily repeating Hamas and UN propaganda about famine. Hamas creates the aid problem. It and other terror groups are stealing aid and selling it to Gazans at inflated prices.
US National Public Radio on November 20 showed the anti-Semitic mentality of Israel’s critics. It reported only 11 of 109 UN aid trucks had succeeded in deliveries the previous weekend. The rest had been stolen by armed militias.
Rather than call on Hamas to secure aid deliveries, NPR quoted a UN spokesperson demanding Israel do more to prevent attacks on aid convoys.
Just as dehumanising of Israelis have been silly reports criticising conservative Israeli government member Itamar Ben-Gvir for admitting he had last year blocked a hostage deal with Hamas.

So many lies and misrepresentations and disinformation, and eventually the reptiles decided the hive mind needed a break ...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone with US President-elect Donald Trump. He thanked Mr Trump for his assistance in advancing the release of the hostages. Picture: X

As a result of that hagiographic snap, the pond can't resist returning to that New Yorker portrait for another quick serve, albeit a bigger chunk ...

...Channel 14 enjoys huge regulatory benefits that its competitors—which have to maintain independent news departments with a publicly appointed board of directors, and are obligated to hand over a percentage of their earnings to support original Israeli productions—do not. The government “turned the entire regulation of television on its head in order to help out Channel 14,” Shwartz Altshuler, of the Israel Democracy Institute, told me. In 2018, she was asked before parliament to speak about media regulation. She called out the lopsided treatment that Channel 14 received. “It was the only time I was ever kicked out of a Knesset committee,” she said. That year, a former Netanyahu spokesman told police investigators about a meeting that Netanyahu had held whose subject was “the need to provide a tailwind” to the network. According to the investigative site Shakuf, the current government has quadrupled its advertising spending on Channel 14, while cutting ad funds for its main competitors by more than half.
Occasionally, Channel 14 participants are forced to issue apologies. Yet the network has been undeterred in its coverage of the war. Its owner is a reclusive billionaire named Yitzchak Mirilashvili. Born in St. Petersburg, Mirilashvili grew up during the tumultuous period after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As rival oligarchs fought to secure the assets once held by the state, Mirilashvili’s father made a huge fortune in businesses spanning oil, real estate, and diamonds. Yitzchak, who moved to Israel in his youth, made his own fortune by helping found Russia’s largest social-media site, VK. Both he and his father are major donors to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
The channel’s coverage of Netanyahu has prompted comparisons to Fox News, but a more apt analogy may be to Russia’s Channel One, the Kremlin-affiliated network. Channel One broadcasts are “a gladiator arena of opinion-makers, each inflaming the other, in front of a live audience,” Persico, of the Seventh Eye, said. “That’s ‘The Patriots’ exactly.” On both outlets, he added, the investigative reporting is negligible. And there is little distance between officials and those who cover them. When I spoke to Magal, he indicated that he had spoken to Netanyahu just a few days earlier, after news broke that one of his aides had been accused of leaking a highly classified security document to the German tabloid Bild. Magal said of Netanyahu, “When he has a message, he calls me.”
Critics of Channel 14 argue that the real problem is not simply the coverage, which is easy enough to turn off. It’s that the network has changed the media landscape: by going so far to the right, it has forced the mainstream to the right, too. Liberman, the “Uvda” reporter, told me, “Once you have an outlet that cries out the loudest and has people on it who call for genocide, if a reporter is out there working on a story about the plight of the Gazan people, then they’ll attack you and label you Al Jazeera.”
More than a year into a war that, according to the Gaza health ministry, has killed an estimated forty-six thousand Palestinians, Israel has not allowed a single journalist into the Gaza Strip without military supervision. On the rare occasion when news of the humanitarian disaster there reaches Israeli screens, it tends to focus on the soldiers and their targets in Hamas. At times, the boundary between the press and the Army vanishes altogether. Last October, Danny Cushmaro, a respected longtime presenter on Channel 12, embedded with a military battalion in southern Lebanon. In one report, a soldier teaches him how to detonate an explosive device. Cushmaro is then seen pressing a button, and a thunderous explosion reduces a building to rubble. Persico, of the Seventh Eye, said that the incident was a “direct result” of Channel 14’s influence.

Of course, it all makes sense. The Major used to rail at the Commie swine, but essentially he's transformed himself into a version of state media, full of suckery of a 'patriots' kind...

In all this, the pond doesn't intend to demean oral sex, which has its place in the world, and is enjoyed by many, it's just that there's no other way to describe what's going on ... you know, the full suck, down there with Zuck, the cuck suck ...

Abdel-Fattah and journalist Antoinette Lattouf who have reposted on X criticism of Ben-Gvir must know even the Jerusalem Post has acknowledged the hostage deal agreed last Wednesday presents real dangers to Israel: the release of perhaps a thousand Palestinian convicted terrorists in return for the 94 remaining Israeli civilian hostages, many of whom may already be dead.
It was the 2011 release of 1026 Palestinian prisoners in return for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit that allowed Yahya Sinwar back to Gaza. Now dead, Sinwar had been sentenced to four life terms for the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of four Palestinians in 1989. Sinwar led the October 7 pogrom.
The Jerusalem Post has conceded Israel risks a repeat with the latest ceasefire, which unarguably rewards hostage taking. Ben-Gvir threatened to quit the government on Thursday because he thinks the latest ceasefire presents grave dangers to Israel.
Journalists often misunderstand the point of terrorism. Islamist attacks in Western countries are designed to show young Muslims the West cares more for white victims than it does for Muslim victims in Islamic countries.
Similarly, October 7 and the sacrificing of innocent Palestinian lives in Gaza are designed to make young Muslims believe the West values Jewish lives more than Palestinian lives.
Back to strength of leadership. No one knows if Trump’s second presidency will be a success.
Yet The Times Of Israel last Thursday reported two Arab sources involved in the Gaza ceasefire talks believe Trump’s negotiator, Steve Witkoff, achieved more in one tense weekend of talks with Netanyahu than Biden did the entire previous year.

Out of the mouth of an innocent babe, going full suck but ending up with a notable insight ... the sacrificing of innocent Palestinian lives in Gaza are designed to make young Muslims believe the West values Jewish lives more than Palestinian lives.

Well yes, you might quibble with the grammar, but fancy discovering a major truth embedded in the Major poison machine...

It reminded the pond of a cunning ploy recently reported in Crikey ... (paywall)

Solicitor Stewart Levitt, of the complainants’ legal team, told The Australian in November a Federal Court judgment on the allegations could “provide a litmus test” for identifying antisemitism, saying: “We think it’s important that the court rules that antisemitism cannot be camouflaged by using the term ‘Zionist’ as a code-word for ‘Jew’.”
“I think it would provide a benchmark for courts and for ­people who wanted to attack Jews, to consider their position, whether they can’t just say dreadful things about Jews by substituting the pronoun ‘Zionists’,” he told the newspaper. 

Oh come on, be a proud Zionist. If you fit the wiki description, embrace it ...

Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people through the colonization of Palestine, an area roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Judaism, and of central importance in Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.

The pond is sure the Major and many of the reptiles at the lizard Oz, as well as the patriots at Channel 14, would be pleased to call themselves Zionists ...

And so to end with the immortal Rowe, celebrating the end times ...