Arcing across the lizard Oz - the bro making plans with Nigel, and the cracking Crace v. Dougie ...

 

The reptiles seem to have hit on a new format to deal with the "news" for the hive mind placed at the top, and the extreme far right dropped down a notch ...

What's interesting, as always, is what's missing, with news that apparently envoy Kellogg has already been dropped from the role of key negotiator and Witkoff being given the guernsey ... in which case there's more going on than just the current war of words between the Cantaloupe Caligula and the hard-pressed Zelensky ...

Now the Kyiv Independent has a dog in the fight, so who knows, but with King Donald I relentlessly regurgitating Russian propaganda and offering never-ending lies embracing all their talking points, it looks like another win for Vlad the Sociopath.

Meanwhile, down in the displaced far right, the usual suspects emerged ...

The pond was vastly relieved. The hunt for petulant Peta, TV sitcom lookalike, goes on, but there was nothing in that lot to trouble the pond...

Note to Erica: with a narcissist of the pure bred quality of King Donald I, it seems that the "Me" movement must be blamed for his development (though Erica fails to explain how the "Me" movement was big in the 1950s).

And the news from Whylla sent the reptiles into a flap, for no apparent reason, except maybe ... Gutpa?

The pond was relieved because the valiant, speechless-inducing Murray was held over from yesterday, and there was also room for the dog botherer, who arced across the reptile skyline yesterday, then quickly disappeared like a spluttering Oscar Wilde rocket heading for the mud ...

So the pond can begin with the bromancer.. making plans with Nigel...some reptile fallout spinning off from Arc, though remarkably not as much as devoted lizard Oz specialists had hoped for ...

Nigel Farage has sage words of advice – for Peter Dutton and the Western world, Nigel Farage, the insurgent prince of British politics, hopes Peter Dutton will win the forthcoming Australian election … but if the Coalition want to achieve a majority, he has one piece of advice.

The reptiles clocked the read at five minutes and naturally it began with a snap of the Clacton-on-Sea oracle... (he claims to visit his seat every so often, though some think Clacton is another example of FAFO) ... Nigel Farage has offered some advice to Peter Dutton ahead of the federal election.

Nige is the compleat boofhead, which makes him perfect company for boofhead bro ... as gullible as any mark or trick or John in the company of a snake-oil seller...

Nige even had the cheek to deflect by talking about snakes ...

Nigel Farage, the insurgent prince of British politics, the cheerier, cheekier, friendlier, British Donald Trump, armed with clear messages and plain speaking, ­exudes maximum self-confidence right now.
“I think Reform UK (Farage’s Party) will win the next British election,” he tells me during an ­interview at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.
“Will it be me as prime minister? I don’t know. I hope so. Life’s a game of snakes and ladders. You never know what life’s going to throw up.”
Britain’s election is still three or four years away.
Dealing with something more proximate, Farage hopes Peter Dutton will win the forthcoming Australian election.
But with the Opposition Leader needing a big swing to beat Anthony Albanese and at least 18 seats before he gets to anything like a majority, Farage has one piece of advice for the Coalition.
“I like Peter Dutton. I think he’s a very, very good, solid guy. I think Dutton’s very good. If I would say anything, it’s just that the whole campaign for the Australian Liberal Party, maybe it just needs a bit more fizz.”
Then he adds: “I like drinking fizz, too.”
Given Farage’s power in the global conservative movement and his extraordinary rise since the early Brexit days, it will be ­advice Mr Dutton will surely take heed of.

Then followed a snap of the diligent boofhead bro, at work with notepad, with the reptiles careful to point out the geography of the room, so no one would confuse the boofheads, Nigel Farage, left, is interviewed by The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan, right, on the sidelines of the ARC conference in London

Rather than pen and pad, they could have equipped the bro with a feather or a wet lettuce leaf, with which to give Nigel a dinkum going over ...

The idea of Reform actually winning a British election when it only has five sitting MPs in the House of Commons might seem far-fetched, but a recent YouGov poll put Reform in first place, narrowly ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives.

Far-fetched? Oh that's bold, but of course it's just a way for the bro to talk up the wild ambitions of the lying, cheating, Brexiting boofhead ...

I ask Farage what is the single biggest issue for the UK, and therefore for Reform.
“The biggest issue is the impact of the population explosion on the quality of life for everybody,” Farage tells me. “There’s been a completely unplanned population increase of 10 million people in the past 20 years. There’s a huge impact on schools. The situation in housing is literally impossible. I mean Generation Rent.
“People in London live like students until they’re 40. People live with mum and dad in a way they haven’t since Victorian England. There are no more roads but 10 million more people. There’s access to health.
“Also, the impact it’s had on communities has been pretty stark. We have towns and cities where there are absolute divisions. One group of people live here, an entirely different group of people live there. There’s a lack of integration. There’s been a growth of Muslim majorities in the inner city parts of some cities, with the lowest educational standards, the highest levels of first cousin marriages, declining health, huge welfare dependency. Is it any wonder extreme ideologies can be fostered in environments like that?”
He proposes Britain should ­become a “net zero” immigration society. Some immigration would continue, but “overall the policy is not to increase the population through immigration over the next few years, to give us half a chance to adjust.”
Farage also wants to create a Britain where Brits themselves want to stay, saying: “I would also like to stop emigration.”
He runs through the types of Brits who are leaving, and he doesn’t want to lose any of them. There are the people who bought a semi-detached house in London decades ago for some thousands of pounds and find it’s now worth a million pounds. They cash in their chips, buy a nice house in Spain, where the weather is good, and they’ve got loads of money left over. The problem with losing that cohort, Farage says, is that they are big spenders in the economy.
“And of course the rich are obviously going. The Conservatives started that.”
By making the tax treatment for foreigners living in London less generous, Conservative and Labour both thought they would assist equity. Instead, they’ve seen a massive drain of millionaires, and much of their capital, from the country. Farage adds sarcastically: “We can’t have successful people in Britain because they’re bad people. Anyone who succeeds is bad, you do understand? Take that with a note of sarcasm please.”
But worst of all is the loss of 30-something entrepreneurial types. They don’t all move to Dubai, Farage says, lots go to Lisbon, or Milan, or even Athens. The cost of living is cheaper, taxes are often lower. “The whole of Europe is putting tax deals in place to grab young British entrepreneurs.”

Typical so far, and then the reptiles slip in a snap of the Clacton-on-Sea man with the allegedly reformed junkie, it being that sort of Arcing of minds, Nigel Farage and Jordan Peterson on the conference stage. Picture: Andrew Parsons/Parsons Media

It's classic bromancer, the sort of nonsense that saw him get wildly excited by Brexit like a lot of other mug punters entranced by the snake-oil sellers ...

Farage seems to be a lucky politician at the moment. As he says: “I think Donald Trump’s victory is especially good for me. If you look at the contract with the people we put at the general election last year, the policy similarities (with Trump) are quite remarkable.
“Back in 2016, we’d won the Brexit vote and suddenly I had a bit of respect. I decided to roll the dice and I backed Donald Trump. People said I was mad. I was almost the only person this side of the Atlantic who defended him.
“We’re personal friends, everyone knows that. I think there is a knock-on effect for Reform, for me. I think it will make a big difference. And if Elon Musk does his thing with the Department of Government Efficiency, that will give us a blueprint.”
Like others, Farage thinks Trump’s victory is a big moment in Western cultural politics: “I think it’s a huge push back against divisive identity politics. No one can doubt Trump does stand up for ­Judaeo-Christian values, which underpin everything our society is built on, including tolerance.”

Ah, those Judaeo-Christian values, like getting behind Vlad the sociopath and belting the shit out of Ukraine, not to mention the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by the millions ... and so forth and etc. and naturally, Nige wants to nuke the country, but to no particular point, because who needs a net-zero target when everything that's going wrong is the fault of plane vapour trails? (The pond thought it would throw that one in to honour US conspiracy theorists):

Farage strongly backs the consensus that Britain must increase its defence spending. But he is more critical of 14 years of Conservative government than he is of the Labour government of today: “The last Labour government in 2010 spent more on defence than the Conservatives spent in any of the 14 years they were there.”
Britain must substantially increase defence spending, he says, “if the Americans are to take us seriously – and without the Americans we are basically defenceless.
“I’ve sat and talked to Donald about defence, about NATO. If he thinks we’re making a fair contribution, he’ll respect us. If he doesn’t, there’s no particular reason why he should.”
Farage is a strong proponent of nuclear energy, as indeed are Labour and the Conservatives. But he would abandon the net-zero target and, he says, save billions of pounds in renewables subsidies.
Farage points out that in Labour’s 25-person cabinet there’s not one who has worked in private business. He says he will bring people with strong business experience, with strong achievements, in to government to help lead a pro-business regime.
“We have to become wealth creators again. Without business, without profit, you can forget about healthcare, you can forget about all the things the state can do to help people.
“We’re at one of those pivotal moments, it’s a bit like the mid to late 1970s. The country was falling to pieces. We were able to turn it round but it was painful. We have to do that again. If we don’t, within a decade we’ll effectively be gone.”

If that's the best advice that Nigel and the bro can offer the mutton Dutton, perhaps it's time to panic, with a gigantic roll-over in the offing ...

What a relief to have the infallible Pope providing a visual break before moving on to the real treat ... another five minute read, and pay attention, Erica, an astonishing display of narcissism, and with Doug born in 1979 it seems that the "Me" movement was also big in the 1980s ...

The narcissism cranked into gear with the header, and continued with relentless snaps of Doug ...

The truth about our decline: Douglas Murray’s talk that left 4000 people at ARC speechless, One of the questions that all ages ask themselves is what do they call the time that they are in? I would like to suggest a name for the era we should be in and the age we can help bring in: the age of reconstruction

Speechless? It pretty much left the pond speechless that Doug should think he can render people speechless, and so to the first narcissist, cringe-inducing snap ...Douglas Murray at the ARC conference. Picture by Andrew Parsons / Parsons Media

Doug went into speechifying mode, as a way of rendering the pond inert and speechless ...

One question all ages ask themselves is what do they call the age they are in. Almost every age confronts this question. Most recently the age of modernism asked what comes after modernism, and the rather unoriginal idea was postmodernism.
Postmodernism, of course, included its offspring deconstructionism, and nothing came from that. But I would like to suggest a name for the age we should be in and the age we can help bring in: the age of reconstruction.
We should be the reconstructionists. The deconstructionists knew something about how to take things apart. But, like children with bicycles, they had no idea how to put them back together. So it will be the job of people like us, the reconstructionists, to try to put that civilisation back together.

Oh for feeble fucks sake, the best this Doug can do is deploy "reconstructionist"?

Then came another narcissist snap, guaranteed to keep the pond in a speechless condition, Murray preparing for his speech Picture by Andrew Parsons / Parsons Media

Because Doug had rendered the pond speechless, it thought it might try a thought experiment, a montage, a collage, what with the cracking Crace having arced up for the Graudian in Nigel Farage, Jordan Peterson & co worship each other in alt-right heaven, Welcome to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, a fatuous echo chamber of self-congratulation.

The cracking Crace seemed even more bewildered and bemused than yet another Tottenham Hotspur loss ...

Fighting the culture wars doesn’t come cheap these days. Tickets for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference at the ExCeL Centre in London cost a discounted £450. A bargain said the organisers, as the original price was £1,500. Maybe they had a point. All 4,000 tickets were sold long before the event began. Even access to a live stream set you back £150. A meta-event where only the global elite are welcome to watch a global elite take on the global elite.
This was “alt-right” heaven. A gathering of some of the biggest names on the circuit. Douglas Murray. Jordan Peterson. Nigel Farage. Niall Ferguson. An echo chamber of self-referential congratulation. A place where people come to have their ideas confirmed, not challenged.
Time and again you heard speakers insist they were saying the unsayable. That their free speech was under attack. And yet no one is stopping them saying or doing anything. They are not under attack from the police or the government. This is not a clandestine meeting. The ExCeL Centre was rented on commercial terms. The only person being excluded from the conference is me. I emailed and texted four different ARC contacts asking for access. No one got back to me. Maybe it’s me who is saying the unsayable. In the end I coughed up for the livestream.
Over the years, I’ve watched some batshit events. This one was right up there. Men and women fighting imaginary battles against an establishment of which they are part. Fighting diversity, inclusion, equality. Anyone who looks and thinks differently to them. All the while, there is literally a war going on in Ukraine. Men and women are dying defending their democratic rights, while the US and Russia meet in Saudi Arabia to carve up the mineral rights of their country without any input from the Ukrainian government. The dictators are taking over the world.
And what did we get in London? An appearance from Katalin Novák, a former president of Hungary, congratulating members of the audience for having had three children or more.
It was everyone’s moral duty to have children to save what was left of our civilisation. Needless to say, Novák omitted to say she had been forced to resign after granting a presidential pardon to the deputy governor of an orphanage who had been imprisoned for his part in covering up a paedophile ring. I guess some children are more equal than others.
The morning had begun with a fanfare from a chamber orchestra and then out stepped Murray. No one has a bigger regard for Dougie these days than Dougie. He has done very well out of the rightwing speaking circuit and now believes himself to be the Divine. He seems to regard other people with mild irritation for not matching his own perfection. His sense of humour replaced by the certainty of his own resurrection. His speech pattern has become more of an extended sneer.

Never say that the pond doesn't provide context, even when rendered speechless by the speechifying Dougie ... a man big into broad ideas, broadly laid down, and rendered with all the nuance of a piece of 4 be 2...

I want to lay out two broad ideas of what we can do to bring this to pass. First, let me begin with an example. In Europe there seems to be a certain contempt for innovations that are occurring in the United States, not least at the governmental level.
There has been much whining and howling about DOGE’s attempts to not just stop government waste but actually expose it. One of its great advantages so far is you not only see a way in which a country like America might balance the budget but, in stripping away all those layers of bureaucracy, you also discover the kind of rot our societies have been willing to put up with for so long.

At this point the reptiles inserted an AV distraction, featuring the wastelands of East London, and there was the smirking Dougie again ...

That was the excuse the pond needed to cut back to the cracking Crace ...

Dougie opened with a complaint about east London. It was too ugly for him. He would have been happier talking somewhere much grander. Still, needs must. There were bills to be paid. He then moved on. We were at a tipping point. The west was in crisis.
Only a return to Christian values could save us. It was time to return to the Bible as the central building block of our civilisation. God would have approved of Elon Musk cutting USAid, he said. Now to get on with slashing the budgets of the US education department. It was only turning out illiterates.
“Ours is the greatest civilisation of all time,” Dougie declared. And it wasn’t too late to protect it. We just had to stop allowing so many foreigners into our country. He was a heartbeat away from saying that people like Kemi Badenoch could never truly be as British as someone who was born white. There again, Kemi has drunk so much of the culture war Kool-Aid, she might even agree.

Back to Dougie, rendering the world speechless...

The administration in Washington – after USAID was found to be so rotten it had to be gotten rid of entirely – is now looking at the Department of Education. In America, as in the rest of West, there is no greater task. In New York State, where I spend much of my time, an average spend for state school is now, per pupil, around $US35,000 a year.
For that sum, kindergarten through to 12 students finish with only about half of them attaining basic literacy and about half basic numeracy. So nobody can say money is the problem. You can keep throwing money at this problem, and you can still create more and more illiterates.
There are many things that can be looked at and the first is innovation. There’s an enormous amount to learn, rather than to scorn about the American experience. There are reasons why so many of the unicorn start-ups are from America. There must be something they’re doing right. In Britain we still have a situation where one in five of the working age population simply do not work. The rest of the taxpayers subsidise those people not to work. This is a great national scandal, but still something our governments don’t care to address.
To my mind, one of the great explanations for this disparity in innovation between Europe and America is very simple. It’s our attitude towards risk. In America, the idea remains that life is risky – that success is risky. But across much of the West, we’ve fallen into a kind of complacency, which is a sort of welfarism.

There has to be a cartoon for all of that, and Dougie's mind ...

The reptiles decided to introduce a snap of another prime narcissist, with the speechless-rendering narcissist... Nigel Farage with Murray Picture by Andrew Parsons / Parsons Media

Not to Erica, with Nigel-all-at-Sea, a classic narcissist hustler and snake oil seller born in 1964 and so heading past sixty, it seems that the "Me" movement carried on from the 1950s and 1960s... (what did Erica have to say about the childhood of classic narcissist Adolf? The pond admits to not knowing or caring).

At this point, the pond thought it should also provide a link to Gaby Hinsliff in The Graudian, This is Farage’s moment of reckoning: he can choose British voters – or Putin and Trump

Gabuy was agitated by Nige as Putinist ...

...Existing Reform voters are by far the most pro Trump of any party, with 54% saying they were happy to see him elected in November compared with 16% of voters overall, according to YouGov. But it is what’s left of the Conservative vote Nigel Farage needs to win over – and only 20% were happy to see this particular Republican in the White House even before it became clear exactly what he was going to do.
As the US retreats, Europe must look out for itself – so is Macron’s nuclear offer the answer?
Being painted as a Putin apologist, meanwhile, is, if anything, even more electorally toxic than being pro Trump: just ask any Labour MP forced to defend Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of the Salisbury poisonings to angry constituents. Though war fatigue has crept in lately, with 32% of Britons favouring a negotiated settlement in Ukraine rather than fighting until the Russians withdraw, that’s still a minority view; and fewer still will want to see the Ukrainians come out of that settlement badly, as Farage himself acknowledged last week by suggesting Nato membership should remain on the table for them.
So Labour should have no qualms whatsoever about punching that bruise, reminding its Reform-curious voters that Farage once named Putin as the world leader he most admires. Do they really want him anywhere near the levers of power, at a time when British troops will potentially soon be in harm’s way along a new frontline with Russia? And if any of Trump’s threatened trade tariffs come to pass, and start costing jobs in what is left of UK manufacturing industries, his British cheerleaders should be made to own that too.

Back to Dougie, intent on confirming ...

When I returned to Britain recently, I discovered the great debate was about how to kill the elderly more efficiently. I was struck that the only argument any Labour minister could make against euthanasia coming online with the National Health Service was from an MP who said she didn’t think the NHS was capable of performing euthanasia efficiently.
I mentioned at the time that this was wrong in one important respect. The NHS is a world leader in killing the elderly; it’s just they only kill the people who don’t want to die. The NHS is always said to be the envy of the world and yet no one can find a GP appointment.

The pond should interrupt to say that it has just come off watching Tilda Swinton kill herself in Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door, which also commits the crime of mentioning climate change, and though it's all a little obvious, with too much speechifying and emotionalism for the pond, it makes a lot more sense than Dougie ...a stupid man imagining that he's got clever insights to offer clever people ...

Clever people can sometimes say very stupid things. And in a recent interview, Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens, was asked if there was any book he would recommend that people could read in the present to understand the future that’s coming. He said no he couldn’t think of such a book because change was going to be so incredibly fast.
That’s flat out wrong. Change has always happened. And if you want a book to guide you, how about having the book that’s guided your forebears? Now to do that, you need civilisational renewal and that includes the ability to look back.

Then came another snap, reassuring readers that Dougie not only left listeners speechless, they were turned into stunned mullets, with a differently cropped version of an already seen snap as yet another narcissist reprise, Murray’s talk left the audience stunned Picture by Andrew Parsons / Parsons Media

Stunned? Well the cracking Crace seemed stunned by it all ...

Next up was career charlatan Jordan Peterson interviewing Nigel Farage. At least that was the way it was billed. In practice, it turned out to be Jordan interviewing Jordan. Peterson is even more of a narcissist than Nige and automatically assumes he is the most important person in any room. You dread to think what would happen if you put Jordan and Dougie together. An ego death match. It’s not often Nige is the sanest person in the building. Very low bar and all that.
What Jordan most wanted to talk about was why net zero was an appalling act of wanton self-destruction. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that Jordan considered himself an expert in climate science by virtue of having no expert knowledge. It was all a myth. We should use as much oil and gas as we could. When he finally got a word in, Farage admitted he had no scientific knowledge either but didn’t consider that a drawback either. He also wanted small nuclear reactors, which he forgot to mention is a Labour policy.
Then Jordan moved on to his favourite subject. What the world needed was more heterosexual couples to get married. Homosexuality was a deviation. There was too much abortion and divorce in the world. You’d be hard pushed to hear a more unpleasant rant all year. It was too much even for Nige, who confessed he had been divorced twice. He looked nervously at Jordan before ending by saying there would be more children under Reform. Trying to win over the audience. Still, at least no one asked him about his admiration of Putin. I’ve never seen Nige more pleased to leave the stage.
It was hard to top that weirdness. But Ayaan Hirsi Ali had a good go. Her call was for more nationalism. People were wrong to say that the second world war had been caused by German nationalists. There were good nationalists and bad nationalists. Good Nazis and bad Nazis. We needed more Maga, less globalism. Donald Trump was merely the embodiment of the Christian message as written in Genesis, Leviticus and Romans.

The pond can understand why the cracking Crace failed to understand or explain the extraordinary meaning of vanilla...

We’ve wasted so much time in recent years. People have made us move at such a retarded speed. We’ve had years of talking about the most basic things that our species already knew, such as men and women and who are they. Who had time for this in the past?
The problem is there’s a cost to this – there has been a civilisational cost to be made to go at the speed of the slowest kids in the class.
One response to the era of mass migration that I’ve written a great deal about has been what I’ve called the deculturation of our societies, the idea that in order to welcome people into our societies, we effectively have to pretend we’re uninteresting and unimportant places until migration makes us interesting.
Recently a friend of mine used an analogy to explain this to me. He said that, as a boy, he had the impression that ice cream was something whose base flavour was vanilla, and all other flavours were added on top of vanilla. It was only at some point in his youth, he said, that he discovered vanilla itself has a flavour, and a very complex flavour.
The West has created an extraordinarily complex and rich flavour, and we have spent recent years pretending we have no flavour, or that flavour is something that only other people bring to us. This is, of course, flat out wrong, but it’s been something we’ve now told more than one generation of young people in the West.

Should the pond mention to Dougie that in its original addictive form, chocolate doesn't contain vanilla? 

While the pond loves vanilla, there's nothing like the adrenalin rush provided by pure dark chocolate...

Get a life Dougie, get into dark chocolate and experience true Zen ...

Such a stupid man, and then there was a snap naming all the stupids coming together, though only Jordie made the cut, At ARC 2025, thought leaders shared powerful messages on courage, happiness, and unity. Jordan Peterson explored the values of self-sacrifice and cooperation, Arthur Brooks offered insights on cultivating lasting happiness, and Philippa Stroud inspired attendees with a call to face challenges with integrity and purpose.

Back to Dougie for a last rousing gobbet ...

We’ve told them that we don’t really have anything very great, or if we do we ought not to talk about it much. I believe this is wrong because what we have in the cities of Europe and the West are the greatest civilisation the world has known.
We have a choice either to live in the wastelands or to rebuild them. Now, there are cities in Europe – I think of Budapest and I think of many German cities – where the idea is you actually can restore beauty to the built environment, and that people do not need to wander like lost souls around the wastelands looking for meaning against buildings that tell them, “you are nothing, you do not matter”.
We have the opportunity to restore not just the built environment, but the educational environment. And when we talk about our culture we must realise that it’s not just something young people should revere, but something they can add to – to understand the conversation, the poetry of mankind. To understand that just because Mozart is great does not mean you cannot build on Mozart. That just because great buildings are great does not mean you cannot add to them.
In the age of reconstruction, I would urge that our greatest task is not just to break through with innovation but to reclaim what is ours. To say that we love it, and that if people wish to join us in the veneration of this civilisation, they are very, very welcome to do so. If they don’t wish to join us, there are other places they can be.
Everybody who reveres TS Eliot reveres him in part because he told us and tells us still that a civilisation can be reclaimed even at the 11th hour. But I would say there is another possibility, which is that civilisation can also be reclaimed even at the 13th hour, in the most inauspicious circumstances.
Douglas Murray is an English author and columnist. His latest book is The War on the West (HarperCollins, Australia). This is an edited version of a speech he delivered to the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship conference in London.

Dougie didn't just render the pond stunned and speechless, he and his tribe seemed to have the same impact on the cracking Crace, turned as hapless as a Spurs fan ...

The morning ended with the historian Niall Ferguson, husband of Ali, declaring he was sorry to have missed a good war. Change only happened through armed conflict and he couldn’t wait for the next one to see off anyone who didn’t read the Bible. Or the Torah. In neo-con world, the Israelis are honorary Christians. Most incredibly of all, Niall seemed to think that SAS Rogue Heroes was a documentary series.
I think I need to lie down in a darkened room for a while.

Indeed, indeed, but the pond hopes to recover later in the day, and offer a late arvo posting on a resurgence in Trumphalism, aka all the writing about - pay attention Erica - the biggest narcissist of them all...a product of the 1950s "Me" movement ...

Now as this has all had a vaguely British flavour - how the pond has neglected the valiant British in recent Trumphalist times - so why not end with a couple of outings with James? Just as a variation on ending with 'toons. 

In the first James offered thoughts on 'The fool who thinks she's a genius', with one of the pond's favourite English comedians, Tony Hancock, who killed himself while in Australia - as wandering lost souls are wont to do - scoring a mention ...

 

In the second James wondered 'What the hell should we do now?', for which alas there's no satisfactory answer...