In which the bromancer offers a gigantic billy goat, and the Caterist acts like a gigantic fascist billy goat...

 

The pond wanted to begin with this effort by Portuguese cartoonist Zez Vaz as a form of therapy. 

Every time the pond sees a Swasticar on the road these days the temptation is to give it a Sieg Heil ... and somebody somewhere would get agitated by this acknowledgement of current realities...

The pond would also like to give a Sieg Heil to Google, owner of Blogger, and so of this site - how naïve the pond was back in the early days when "free" worked on bums and bloggers alike. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

What a ripper read was the Graudian story Revealed: Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests, An investigation has exposed the tech firm’s cooperation with autocratic regimes to remove unfavourable content.

Shameful, contemptible, but what can the pond do, except turn to its usual herpetology studies ...

The reptiles were in full campaigning mode, and over on the extreme far right the usual suspects were out and about ...

The pond has only the time and patience for two reptiles this day, so the pond decided to ignore the ever-so-predictable squawkings of the tiresomely repetitive Major Mitchell...

After the tedious blather about renewables came this overly familiar punchline ...

The International Energy Agency on January 15, referring to its latest paper on nuclear energy titled ‘‘The Path to a New Era for Nuclear Energy’’, said: “It’s clear today that the strong comeback for nuclear energy that the IEA predicted several years ago is well under way, with nuclear set to generate a record level of electricity in 2025.”
The IEA says “more than 70 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity is under construction globally”, and more than 40 countries plan to expand nuclear power.
The IEA paper flagged the potential of small modular nuclear reactors, which Bowen has bagged, and says “as the world’s second largest source of low emissions electricity after hydro power, nuclear today produces just under 10 per cent of global electricity supply”.
Note here that nuclear and hydro each produce more power than either wind or solar separately.
People interested in a non-ideological approach to power can find material on a new website, C2NAustralia.com.au (Coal to Nuclear). Run by structural and nuclear engineer Bruce Wymond, it supports renewables, argues opposition to nuclear is ideological and looks for bipartisan approaches to the move away from coal.

What was funny about that? 

Not the worship of SMRs - such a fatuous bit of predictable Major foppery.

Nah the laughs came when the pond saw that the reptiles refused to provide a hot link to the website recommended by the Major.

They couldn't even stump up an active link! 

The reptiles are so obsessed with keeping their punters inside the hive mind that they refuse any activity connected to the outside world, a bit like Mennonites dealing with a measles outbreak ...

That said, nothing much has changed in the SMR world since Graham Readfearn wrote about them back in 2022... (yep, that's an actual active link, feel free to leave herpetology studies and browse)

See how easy it is, reptiles, to link to the real world?

With the Major out of the way, the pond could turn to the study of a pond favourite, the bromancer, out and about with Australia, not Europe, is the big freeloader of US power, The real lesson for Australia to understand is that every tough bit of scolding Trump has applied to feckless Europeans, in terms of defence capability, applies to us only a hundred times more strongly.

This bout of public self-flagellation was worthy of Percy Grainger with a whip or an Opus Dei type with a cilice, dressing it up as "corporal mortification" ...

Naturally it began with a snap of the supplier of the cilice, with the bromancer fearing what Daddy might do ... US President Donald Trump has been talking tough to Europe, but is yet to turn his attention to Australia. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

There'll be no mention of other feats of the mango-coloured Napoleonic monster...

Typically that came from the movies rather than history, as noted in Trump suggests he’s above the law with ominous Napoleon quote, Trump’s allies and Elon Musk are attacking checks and balances with threats to the courts.

The president — whose efforts to gut federal funding, fire thousands of aid workers and unilaterally redefine the 14th Amendment were blocked in federal courts across the country in recent days — invoked a quote often attributed to Napoleon, who justified his despotic regime as the will of the people of France.
The quote from a president with his own imperial ambitions appeared to come from the 1970 film Waterloo, in which Steiger’s Napoleon states that he “did not ‘usurp’ the crown.”
“I found it in the gutter, and I picked it up with my sword, and it was the people … who put it on my head,” he says. “He who saves a nation violates no law.”

And so on, but back to the bromancer lashing himself and the country ...

Australians are in serious danger of drawing all the wrong conclusions from the Trump administration’s harsh lessons and tough, plain-speaking to its European NATO allies.
The lesson is not to acknowledge the unsatisfactory nature of some of Donald Trump’s words and actions. Nor to have a national nervous breakdown about what threatens to be quite marginal US tariffs on us (given the tremendous economic self-harm of our own policies).
The real lesson is to understand that every tough bit of scolding Trump has applied to feckless Europeans, in terms of defence capability, applies to us only a hundred times more strongly.
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told NATO that Europe’s security would no longer be America’s No.1 priority. European nations had been freeloaders on America for too long. As sure as night follows day, a US administration will eventually say the same thing to Australia, but with more justification, and much more devastating consequences.

At this point, the reptiles put up a snap of an allegedly hard drinking, sexually fraught former weekend Fox host as a model to follow, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has told NATO that Europe’s security was no longer America’s No.1 priority. Picture: AFP

As usual, the bromancer offered up a massive billy goat butt for starters ...

The challenge is not to tut-tut about Trump. We can do that as much as we like. The Australian national challenge is to recognise the changed strategic reality and work out what we do, on our own responsibility, to preserve our own national security.
Don’t get me wrong. Some of what Trump has done is appalling and tragic. Negotiating about Ukraine without Ukraine there is horrible, and repeats the worst mistakes of the past. Giving major concessions to the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, such as that Ukraine can never join NATO, is bad in principle and as a negotiating tactic. A widening fissure between the US and European NATO nations weakens the West. Ukraine deserves support.
I wish Donald Trump were Ronald Reagan. But there it is.

Actually bro, the challenge you always fudge is the need to tut-tut about the Cantaloupe Clown ...and the pond routinely gets you wrong, because you're a wretched quisling, lickspittle, fellow travelling sell out.

In reality, the bromancer can sense his dream of a war with China vanishing by Xmas, and with it his chance of being appointed Reichsmarschall des Australisch Reiches by the mutton Dutton.

Now on with the truly creepy crawly abasement to the new Napoleon and his minions...

But let’s also be absolutely clear that every criticism Trump, Hegseth and Vice-President JD Vance make about Europe is true, devastatingly true. Collectively, Europe creates sterling narratives but does nothing. It talks like Winston Churchill, governs like Bernie Sanders. It writes cheques without funds, knowing Washington will have to cash them. US presidents have been making such complains for decades. Some say Trump is entitled to make such complaints, but he’s gone too far. That analysis is hopeless. It completely absolves Europe of adult responsibility. Russia has a smaller economy than Italy. Yet Italy, Germany, France, Britain, Spain and all the other NATO Europeans, whose combined economy is bigger than the US, can’t deal militarily with Russia.

The next snap was so appalling, the pond did its best to minimise the toxic shock, US Vice President JD Vance tells the Munich Security Conference that Europe’s greatest dangers come from within. Picture: Getty

Creepy crawl to him bro ...

Many Europeans at the Munich Security Conference spoke eloquently about the need to support Ukraine indefinitely, about Ukraine joining NATO, etc. All sentiments I’d agree with, but what are the facts? If you add the five biggest European donors to Ukraine together, the US has given Ukraine 50 per cent more military aid than that cumulative total.
Both Russia and Ukraine are in Europe. Trump, rudely but not without reason, asks: Why should American blood and treasure defend Europe, when Europe will not defend itself?
Similarly, Vance’s tart but honest assessment that Europe’s greatest dangers come from within – uncontrolled immigration, the loss of belief by European societies in their own purpose, the intensely undemocratic and anti-security way in which the EU, and other international bodies, ruinously constrict national governments. Vance spoke in a venerable American tradition of providing leadership on core political values to wayward Europeans.

FFS, consorting with the neo-Nazis of the AfD is leadership on core political values? You need to get outside the barking mad fundamentalist monastery more often bro ...

No need to go there, or the pond would be here all day, remembering 1938 and the fate of Czechoslovakia ...

Joe Biden spoke the language of open-ended security commitments, but no one really believed Biden could take decisive action about anything. Trump’s words and some of his actions starkly reveal underlying truths.
So what about Australia?
Britain, where I’ve spent the past couple of weeks, is having a distressed debate about the state of its much-diminished armed forces.
Yet Britain, apart from Poland, is the best of the considerable Europeans. It spends 2.3 per cent of its GDP on defence, which is much, much bigger than Australia’s effort. It’s surrounded by allies, it has an independent nuclear deterrent, yet everyone involved in security in Britain recognises its defence effort is woefully, woefully inadequate.
The quite ideological, and quite left, Labour government of Keir Starmer has pledged to raise defence to 2.5 per cent of GDP.

Tragic. The bromancer seems to think it's all about some minor lift in defence spending, as if Brexit dilapidated Britain was still some sort of effective military power, Britain, under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has pledged to raise defence to 2.5 per cent of GDP.

Over the weekend, the pond's logarithms served up The Navy With More Admirals Than Warships ...

Then came the bromancer's real fear ... his war with China by Xmas as a fast-disappearing dream ...

How does Australia compare? We face, in China, an infinitely more capable strategic competitor than Russia. We face the worst strategic circumstances since World War II. Apart from New Zealand, which has no defence capability to speak of, we have no nearby allies.
In the last completed budget year, our defence spending did not even reach 2 per cent of GDP. Our defence capability has gone badly backwards under Labor.
Like Europe we’ve had decades of warnings, but our feeble, tiny defence force is less capable today than it was three years ago. We have just three capable war ships and they are by no means tier-one combatants. The Albanese government has made one big decision about our most capable service, the air force, which is to cancel the fourth squadron of F-35 jets.
We should have vastly more of everything in defence.
We could, by following an asymmetric military strategy, make ourselves a very tough nut indeed. We do none of that because, like the Europeans, we won’t make a tough resourcing decision. All the security cheques we write are meant to be cashed by our great and powerful friend, Uncle Sam.
We consume vastly more American security than Washington consumes Australian security. We’re not in the US alliance to please Washington. The US alliance is the alpha and omega, the absolute totality, of our security policy. We’ve chosen to be impotent.

So the bromancer is going to do it alone, boost defence spending, save Taiwan and defeat the Xi dragon.

In your phantom dreams, bro ...

Actually it was the liar from the shire's delusional mob that set that pathetic submarine course in action, and there's no need to deflect that with a snap featuring Defence Minister Richard Marles, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for Defence Industry and Capability Delivery Pat Conroy have left our tiny defence force less capable today than it was three years ago. Picture: NewsWire/Philip Gostelow

The bro did his best to hang in with the neo-Napoleon ...

Our reaction to potential American tariffs is grossly overblown. We could learn something from the Brits’ phlegmatic reaction. The US has often enough applied rough tariffs to security partners, such as Japan in the 1980s. Tokyo didn’t destroy the alliance over these trade actions because the alliance is overwhelmingly in Japan’s interests.

Oh there's been some grand FAFO'ing of late, as in the NY Times Trump’s Funding Freezes Bruise a Core Constituency: Farmers, A rapid-fire array of directives by the Trump administration have left farmers and businesses in rural America reeling. (archive)

And how about How Trump’s Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State, Changes to a key funding formula will reduce research grants at hospitals and universities by billions — and may discourage future research.

And that's only scratching the surface, but the bromancer pressed on regardless ...

Much that we tell ourselves about security is a lie. We claim to have been with the Americans in every military engagement since World War I. It’s not literally true and it’s not remotely true in spirit. We normally make tiny, niche contributions, with very little military risk, and do so early to maximise political advantage. Our strategic purpose is never to have meaningful military effect but only to ingratiate ourselves with Washington. Our only military contribution today is to invite the Americans to use northern Australia.
The one piece of admirable rat cunning the Albanese government has displayed, and it’s entirely consistent with our strategic history, is to donate several billion dollars to the Americans and the Brits for nuclear submarine building.
As this column has argued before, these subs may never arrive. Even if they do, it will be far too late to affect today’s dangers. But it’s as near as can be to effectively a national bribe, to ask the Americans and, less crucially, the Brits, not to call out our obvious defence delinquency.
More than 100,000 Americans died defeating Japan in World War II. They secured Australian freedom. No other nation has done anything like that for us. One day a president will ask: Why should American blood and treasure defend Australia, when Australia will not defend itself?
We have no answer to that question.

There's a pretty obvious answer to that question. 

If the bromancer's going to rely on Captain Bonespurs to save him, say hello to Neville Chamberlain.

Meanwhile, bro, take a look at what's happening in the world outside the hive mind ...

There's a whiff of Gillary in that dish ...

It requires a special kind of ostrich, of the bromancer kind, to hide head in sand and avoid seeing that head, neigh that globe, on the chopping block ...

And so to the contemptible Caterist.

The Caterist is always contemptible, but he was truly, grossly contemptible in today's outing, JD Vance’s home truths too hot to handle for Euro-elite, For the Euro-elite, the new US administration is the sum of all fears. The 47th President is not merely some kind of second Trump, but the actual Donald Trump with an agenda.

The reptiles began with a terrifying snap, US Vice President JD Vance speaks during the 61st Munich Security Conference. Picture: AFP

The Caterist - is he a neo-Nazi at heart? - was on board from the get go...

In early 2022, on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kamala Harris assured delegates at the Munich Security Conference that the US alliance with Europe was rock-solid.
“That’s great,” conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger remarked. “But is it for good? Many in Europe are fearful of a time where maybe some kind of a second Trump could be looming in the future.”
For the Euro-elite, the new US administration is the sum of all fears. The 47th President is not merely some kind of second Trump but the actual Donald Trump with an agenda.
On Friday, Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, was greeted with nervous applause as he took the podium at the Munich conference. Harris’s 2022 speech focused on an external enemy. Vance, on the other hand, was there to talk about the enemy within, the woke forces undermining the common principles of freedom and democracy that underpin the post-war trans-Atlantic alliance.

The reptiles helped out with an AV distraction, blathering about Orwellian thought control ...

Sky News host James Morrow claims US Vice President JD Vance delivered a “banger” of a speech in Munich where he criticised the “values” of European governments. “Vance is right; free speech is in retreat across Europe, and every week on this program, we bring you new examples of the Orwellian thought control apparatus being brought to bear on a population beset by terrorism and knife crime but where the real problem for the authorities is thought crime.” “The whole speech was an absolute tour de force, a banger. “What Vance was saying to the Europeans is this – you are making yourselves unrecognisable, culturally, politically, socially, and running against all the values of liberty and enlightenment that once made you European.”

Oh shrink it down, shrink it down as much as possible ...

What to say about this? Perhaps a cartoon ...

The pond needed that ... no one wins reading the Caterist, because the Caterist keeps on getting deeper into bashing the 'leets, apparently on the basis that oligarch billionaires are no longer 'leet ...

“The threat that I worry the most about vis a-vis Europe is not Russia,” Vance said. “It’s not China. It’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”
If Europe was to defend itself against foreign enemies, it must first be clear about what it was protecting. “What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?” he said.
Vance illustrated Europe’s retreat from liberty by detailing the case of Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old British Army veteran who was found guilty in Bournemouth Magistrates Court of praying within 150 metres of an abortion clinic. The court reasoned that his silent prayer amounted to “disapproval of abortion” because, at one point, his head was seen slightly bowed, and his hands were clasped. Smith-Connor’s moving defence that he was praying for his unborn son, who had been aborted 22 years ago, cut no ice. He was ordered to pay costs of £9000 ($17,800).
Vance illustrated the elite’s apparent contempt for democracy by pointing to mass migration.
“No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants,” he said. “All over Europe, they’re voting for political leaders who promised to put an end to out-of-control migration.”
The elite had gone further by refusing to deal with democratically elected parties they didn’t like. In France, President Emmanuel Macron contrived to deal Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National out of any meaningful role in government, despite that party winning the largest share of votes in the legislative election.

Inevitably the diviner of the movement of flood waters in quarries zoned in on climate science, in the form of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Like everything in the lizard Oz these days, so tiresomely predictable ...

The centre-right and centre-left parties in the European parliament used a similar strategy to sideline a bloc of patriotic conservative parties in elections in June.
In Germany, the SPD, in cahoots with the nominally centre-right CDU, will try to use the same tactics to neuter Alternative fur Deutschland after next week’s Bundestag election.
The excuse in every case is that the leper parties are dangerously far right; if not fascist, then fascist adjacent. Vance drew attention to the arrogance at the heart of this argument. “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters,” he said. “There’s no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle, or you don’t.”
After almost 18 minutes of uncompromising criticism, Vance tried to soften the atmosphere with a joke. “I say this with all humour,” he began. “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
Vance paused in anticipation of laughter. There wasn’t any. Deutsche Welle reported: “The tension in the room was almost palpable.”

That's partly because (a) it isn't funny, (b) Vance is only funny when you think he's fucking a couch, and (c) climate science isn't a punchline ...

But the Caterist was right on board ...

Vance’s speech would have been uncontroversial had it been printed as an article in the National Review.
Yet Europe’s oligarchs are ill-prepared for such insubordination. They attend conferences such as this one to have their egos stroked, not to listen to home truths from a self-confessed hillbilly.

So Uncle Leon isn't an oligarch, instead take a squiz at German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Picture: AFP

The pond has noted before the Caterist's tendency to hang off the teat of populist authoritarian autocrats of the Viktor Orbán of Hungary kind, exemplified by the onion muncher, the Caterist and Rebecca Weisser all being "visiting fellows" at the Danube Institute ...a grand gathering of the pampered 'leets with snouts in authoritarian autocrat's trough ...

That's how you get this kind of line ...

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accused Vance of unacceptably interfering in the imminent elections on behalf of AfD, a party he said was linked to the Nazis. 

Hang on, hang on, the AfD literally came from neo-Nazism, and still exudes a Nazi air...per the BBC ...

...The latest controversy comes after the Alternative for Germany (AfD)'s Maximilian Krah told journalists that SS members weren’t automatically "criminals".
"It depends. You have to assess blame individually. At the end of the war there were almost a million SS. Günter Grass was also in the Waffen SS," he told La Repubblica and the Financial Times, referring to the German novelist who wrote The Tin Drum.
"Before I declare someone a criminal, I want to know what he did."
The SS, or Schutzstaffel, were a Nazi paramilitary group active in the 1930s and 1940s. Among other crimes against humanity, SS members played a leading role in the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jews and others during World War Two.
In response to the remarks, France’s far-right National Rally (RN) announced it would no longer sit with the AfD in the European Parliament.
RN leader Marine Le Pen told French radio that "it was urgent to establish a cordon sanitaire" between the parties.
"Cordon sanitaire" is a term used by some political parties to reject cooperation with movements viewed as too extreme. It is often used by French politicians to rule out working with Ms Le Pen's RN.

"It’s time to make a clean break with this movement," she added.

Has the Caterist fewer scruples than Ms Le Pen? 

Of course he has ... (though to be fair, she has rediscovered her roots of late, and would have soon hooked up with Adolf back in 1933) ...

Yep, the Caterist was all in on the triumph of the neo-Nazis ...

Yet Scholz’s attempt to grasp the moral high ground emphasised the draining authority of Europe’s political class, which has struggled to come to terms with the popular fury driving support towards parties such as the AfD in almost every European democracy.
Scholz’s SPD is running a distant third at 16 per cent in the latest polling, seven points behind the AfD. The Chancellor’s approval rating is 20 per cent, according to a recent Newsweek survey comparing the popularity of national leaders. Macron is on 18 per cent. Trump, by contrast, has never been more popular. Newsweek puts him at 52 per cent.
Vance sees the European old guard’s intolerance of dissent as a sign of weakness. “To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words, like misinformation and disinformation,” he said. They “simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way”.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.

How Adolf would have enjoyed their company, and they his ...

And so to end with a few cartoons devoted to domestic matters. 

The pond has been avoiding the reptiles in election campaign mode, and with good reason ...