The pond did like this story ...
House Republican Wants To Speak With Investigators of JFK Assassination – Who Are All Dead
According to her wiki, this house GOPer Luna is 35, which explains why she has the mindset of a teen TikTokker... or perhaps if your degree is from the University of West Florida, you're basically 'gator bait.
Sayeth the Luna (the name resonates with the pond too):
Based on what we’re actually looking to do with the JFK investigation, I’m looking to actually bring in some of the attending physicians at the initial assassination. Then also people that had been on the various commissions looking into it, like the Warren Commission looking into the initial assassination. There’s been conflicting evidence. And I think that even the FBI at the time reported some anomalies in the initial autopsy at Bethesda, Maryland. All of those seem to have been rinsed and repeated in the media to push a certain narrative that we don’t agree with.
Mediaite, spoilsports and fun police, reported:
The Warren Commission had seven members, all of whom are dead, as are the majority of counsels who worked on it. Also deceased are the doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas – Charles Baxter, Robert McClelland, and Malcolm Perry – who examined Kennedy when he was brought in after being mortally wounded. Later that day, an autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital by Drs. James Humes and Thornton Boswell, who are also dead.
Even the reptiles down under can't manage that level of sublime stupidity and rich comedy...
On another matter, Elsie Chen, Erika Kinetz and Dake Kang did a great story for AP, Her parents were injured in a Tesla crash. She ended up having to pay Tesla damages.
What a vindictive, malicious, predatory company it is, fully at one with Xi's China.
Tesla has profited from the largesse of the Chinese state, winning unprecedented regulatory benefits, below-market rate loans and large tax breaks. With a few pointed exceptions, Tesla has enjoyed largely ingratiating coverage in the Chinese press, and journalists told AP they have been instructed to avoid negative coverage of the automaker.
Tesla’s windfall has extended to the courts — and not just in legal actions Tesla has brought against customers. In a review of public court documents, AP found that Tesla won nearly 90% of civil cases over safety, quality or contract disputes brought by customers.
“The government gave Tesla a super status that put consumers in a very vulnerable position,” said Qiao Yudong, a former lawyer for American sports car company Saleen Automotive in China. “That’s why some consumers had to resort to extreme actions.”
One of those desperate customers was Zhang...
Well that's the teaser. You can guess the rest, or follow the link down into an Uncle Leon hell hole ... and what with AP having been banned, why not give them a plug?
And after that rich entertainment, the pond can turn to the lizard Oz for the day's reptile doings and doo-doo ...
So the Cantaloupe Caligula has finally got around to selling out Ukraine ... two narcissist sociopaths doing what must be done.
Over on the extreme far right, the pond dreads Thursdays because petulant Peta usually hovers into view, but not this day ...
What a relief that the pond could bypass the craven Craven, acting as the thought police and insisting that freedom of speech must be policed.
That sounds like a combination of the dangerously woke and the snowflake ...
The pond also usually avoids The Mocker, on the basis that the reptiles stridently disapprove of anonymous scribblers ... but relief was at hand, because the Lynch mob was out and about, ready to defame the reputation of the University of Melbourne in his usual way ...
In two bold moves, he has threatened to end Danish control of Greenland and to defund the colonising mission of a large US government agency. Is the anti-Trump left not entertained?
It was just a four minute read, or so the reptiles said, and it began with a wildly exciting snap, Donald Trump Jr's plane landed in Nuuk, Greenland, where he made a short private visit, weeks after his father, Donald Trump, suggested Washington annex the autonomous Danish territory.
Perhaps the reptiles thought it was better to show the plane on the snow than snow on nostrils ...
The pond must confess that in this outing the Lynch mob sounded thoroughly confused, or perhaps the mission was simply to be confusing ...
He has been busy waging a war on left-wing nostrums, from DEI to working from home. He has begun to deport illegal immigrants and reduced the number of genders back to two. He is using tariffs to give his friends and foes the willies. At the stroke of a pen, he freed every American implicated in the January 6, 2021, riot.
But did we pin Trump as a decoloniser? A central creed of the progressive academy, decolonisation aims to reduce the power of white people (always the colonisers) over people of colour (always the colonised).
To decolonise a government department or school curriculum means making them less white and less deferential to (poorly defined) white systems of power and knowledge.
While the strategy relies on a confection of historically nonsensical theories, it has become culturally very powerful. Perhaps so powerful that even Trump seems to have imbibed its logic.
In two bold moves, he has threatened to end Danish control of Greenland and to defund the colonising mission of a large US government agency. Is the anti-Trump left not at least entertained?
For decades, progressives have told us to atone for the sins of empire. Trump agrees. He wants less Denmark in the Americas and fewer Americans in the developing world. Isn’t this what the left have always demanded?
Perhaps it's a cunning ploy ... in a bold stroke, the Lynch mob has avoided celebrating the arrival of Tulsi, and the impending destruction of American health and education and federal government in general, and managed to dismiss tariffs and the depredations of Uncle Leon in a few lines ...
And while proposing to entertain, he missed the recent huge entertainment. How bizarre was that press conference with nose-picking child and miffed orange orangutang glowering at child and pushing Leon spawn aside...
There's an immortal Rowe for that ...
Now that's entertainment...
The Lynch mob dodged all that so he could focus on the stuff that matters ... red, white and blue land ... Donald Trump and Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.
The Lynch mob seems to be operating on the principle that it doesn't matter if the orange oracle fucks the United States and the planet, provided he irritates a phantom left, and so pleases the Lynch mob ...
The pond was still trying to work it out when the Lynch mob did a Henry and went back in time ...
The two greatest additions to US territory were real estate deals. In 1803, America paid France $US15m (a steal) for what now constitutes about a third of the lower 48 states. The Louisiana Purchase was the biggest real estate deal in history. Alaska was purchased from Russia 64 years later. The United States has even bought territory from the Danes before. The US Virgin Islands were Danish until 1917. So why not Greenland?
Trump, of course, has not mooted buying Greenland to restore its complex indigenous heritage; scholars dispute whether any humans were ever original to the mostly frozen island. He sees a national security advantage in American ownership. As we experience a period of global warming, the Artic will become a playground for the great powers. He also just loves the idea.
The United States Agency for International Development has been a euphemism for colonialism since the 1960s. Begun by president Kennedy, USAID “is the principal US agency responsible for extending development assistance to countries around the world”.
In Trump’s brave new world, the agency is just an expensive way of interfering where foreigners don’t want or need it. Even wealthy, woke, anti-Israel Ireland gets USAID “development assistance”.
Sorry, there came that word again ...
The pond was reminded of the amazing sight of Bill Kristol - yes Billy boy himself - scribbling The Right to be Woke ...
That's how weird the madness has become. Bill was agitated by the mango Mussolini's Kennedy Center Coup - what with the MM being a huge patron of y'artz - and ended up ...
“I am an Englishwoman, born to be free,
And defy anyone who would attempt to coerce me!”
We are Americans, born to be free, temporarily burdened with officials who seek to infringe on our liberties. But against Trump’s casual authoritarianism, we can take heart from Blonde’s attachment to the cause of freedom. And that freedom includes—and if I shock my conservative friends or ex-friends by saying this, so be it—the right to be woke.
Sorry Bill, no time for Mozart, we're into the Vikings and sticking it to the Danes ...
Political journalist John Fund has reacted to a viral video of Danish MP Anders Vistisen slamming US President Donald Trump. “It got that guy more media attention in Denmark than he has ever received and ever will receive,” Mr Fund said. “This performance art that Trump does where he says Canada can be the 51st state and he’ll buy Greenland, it’s certainly gotten the attention of the Danes and I think that they’re going to come to the table more quickly than they otherwise would.”
It's payback time, pussy Danes, and the Lynch mob is doing the paying ...
Trump is less jumping on some neo-Marxist decolonisation bandwagon than he is responding to a powerful tradition, deeply rooted America’s history and psychology. The US is the greatest decolonising force in world history. American power was a key agent in the British retreat from empire.
In 1956, president Eisenhower struck a final nail in its coffin. When Britain, France and Israel attempted to seize back the Suez Canal from Egypt’s Colonel Nasser, who had nationalised it, Ike refused his support. The British empire ended that November. France, too, under US pressure, lost its foothold in the Middle East. Pan-Arab nationalism had an American facilitator.
Ditto the decolonisation of Africa. The US acted to end European control across the continent. In Asia, having ended the barbarity of Japanese imperialism in the 1940s, America was the imperfect bulwark against the communist imperialism that filled the vacuum in the 1950s and 60s.
Ronald Reagan condemned the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” – it fell, without so much as a press release, within three years of his leaving the White House.
Americans don’t do empire. They were born against it. They began the slow decline of British imperial power by declaring their independence from it and then making war on it, twice: 1776-83 and 1812-14.
The Spanish Empire, one of the mightiest, was set on the road to ultimate extinction by war with the US.
The 1898 Spanish-America war, fought over The Philippines, by president McKinley, one of Trump’s heroes, began the present era of American empire. McKinley, so it was said, could not locate the islands on a map.
Yep, that's as intense a bout of weird navel-gazing as the pond has seen in recent times.
It takes remarkable amount of cheek to call the Vietnam war an "imperfect bulwark".
The insouciant Lynch mob's inane natter was compounded by the reptiles heading off to the cheap archives to find a huge snap, The fatal wounding of President William McKinley.
The pond has every confidence correspondents will be sent into a frenzy, especially as the Lynch mob uses as a lodestone one of the truly terrible franchises in movie history, unless you happen to be interested in galactic trade wars ...beyond the valley of the nerd and geek ...
The supreme irony, of course, is that America realised an empire while decrying empire. This has created an ineluctable tension in its foreign policy. Its leaders want a global role without committing the resources necessary to its maintenance.
They want power without responsibility. They want to be central to global affairs but be protected from their effects. They want to be in and out. Rexford Tugwell, US governor of Puerto Rico (1941-1946), called it “confused colonialism”.
George W. Bush offered the last great case study of this confusion. He invaded Iraq in 2003 to establish an empire of democracy in the Middle East. He refused to commit enough troops for the job. His war on terror proved insufficiently imperial.
Donald Trump is next in line to wrestle with this tension and to betray his confusion. His desire to decolonise Greenland and USAID and to colonise Gaza (with casinos) sounds a bizarre contradiction. The impulse is as old as the US experiment itself.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
By the end of it all, the pond was as confused as the Lynch mob was sounding ...
On a point of order muh lud, is substituting one colonial master for another in the matter of Greenland actually decolonising?
Or does the Lynch mob like to follow Humpty Dumpty's edicts when it comes to using words?
Even worse, a crucial matter hadn't been resolved or even discussed, though it was of deep interest to the likes of Mad Mel Max...
Perhaps tomorrow Henry, hole in bucket man, will return to sort it out ...
Meanwhile, poor JD has really missed out, what with him not being anointed successor...
For its reptile bonus, the pond decided to turn back the clock, and have Mein Gott explain everything in Should steel and aluminium be in our industrial base?, If Australia wants to keep its aluminium industry, it might need to abandon the subsidy and embrace low cost energy, US style. That of course is politically impossible for the Albanese government.
For some strange reason, the reptiles opened with suss Sussaann and an extended AV distraction:
Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has thrown her support behind the government’s efforts to resolve the ongoing tariff dispute with the US. Ms Ley emphasised that the Opposition wants the government to succeed in resolving the issue, as it is in the best interests of Australia and its industries. The Deputy Opposition leader’s remarks come as Donald Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro accused Australia of “killing” the US aluminium industry. “Whatever happened before happened, what matters is what we do now. And what matters more than anything for us is that the government does well. We want them to do well, we want Australia to succeed,” Ms Ley told Sky News Australia. “But we also know that the quality of the relationships between senior officials, between prime ministers, between ambassadors is vital at a time like this. So, as I said, we’re backing the government to do this and do it well on behalf of our industries because no one supports these tariffs in Australia.”
Really? Shouldn't we just accept our place in the mango Mussolini universe?
Tread on me, tread on Mein Gott ... but Mein Gott was standing by, ready to respond to the tariffs challenge ...
Port Kembla, Whyalla and all the major aluminium production sites are in danger.
As Donald Trump prepared for the 2024 American election, he faced exactly the same question and decided he wanted to have both steel and aluminium — plus automotive manufacturing — as part of the US industrial base.
These fundamental issues are currently being clouded by what I call the “Trump preliminaries”. The US President is a deal maker, and he loves to make controversial proposals both in industry protection and international relations, but he is always willing to change initial controversial proposals.
As I will explain below, US ambassador Kevin Rudd has a very easy job to secure steel access to the US. But in the Port Kembla survival stakes it is a minor matter. And for Whyalla it is irrelevant.
The reptiles followed up with a snap of the sort of gushing molten flame that gives them a groin tingle, Bluescope’s Port Kembla steelworks. Picture: Supplied
In the interim, the pond had made the fatal mistake of reading the keen Keane over at Crikey, You there, Gina? Australia’s MAGA fans awfully silent on Trump’s tariffs, Why aren’t Trump’s Australian supporters defending our economic interests?
For example, where are Australia’s diehard MAGA supporters when it comes to defending Australia’s economic interests?
How about billionaire heiress Gina Rinehart, perhaps our highest-profile Trump fan? Has she criticised the possible imposition of tariffs on Australia’s exports? So far, crickets — even though Rinehart, as a huge supplier of iron ore to China, has a vested interest in steel markets.
What about Anthony Pratt, who is such a big Trump fan he’s moving to the United States? Nothing from him.
How about all the Trump fans at Sky News? Did they bring their usual insight and intelligence to standing up for Australia’s exporters? No, they bagged Anthony Albanese instead. Quelle surprise.
More subsidisation may be required to keep our aluminium production alive.
The industrial base histories of the US and Australia are remarkably similar. Both during and after World War II, America built a massive industrial base spearheaded by steel, aluminium motor and a vast number of related industries.
Then manufacturers in China offered much lower prices for an enormous range of products and large parts of the US industrial base were shifted to China.
At the time, many Chinese nationals were stunned that the US allowed China and later Mexico to take such a large part of its industrial base. As Trump sees it, he is using the tariff mechanism to reverse a stupid US mistake as well as to generate income.
In Australia, post-war, we made a similar decision to the US and built our industrial base behind tariffs, partly to offset our lack of economies of scale.
In the current century, we abandoned our motor industry, partly because of the hopeless work practises that unions imposed on the industry — but we kept our steel and aluminium business. We were helped by low raw material and energy costs.
For Australia, negotiating a tariff exemption in steel will be both easy and irrelevant. Australia, via BlueScope, has already erected in the US an electric arc steel making complex products, equal to the size of Port Kembla, andthe company operates substantial steel rolling mills and end product operations.
In the first tariff negotiation Trump agreed to Australia sending 300,000 tonnes of steel from Port Kembla to Bluescope’s operations in the US and that still continues. The tonnage equals 10 per cent of the Port Kembla output and a similar percentage of the US raw material. It is an internal company transfer of relatively minor importance to our position as a major US steelmaker. The BlueScope operation in the US is far more profitable than Australia, partly because its power costs are much lower thanks to access to nuclear power.
Aluminium is a different story.
Australia’s biggest electricity user, Tomago Aluminium, in the NSW Hunter region last November announced that switching to predominantly renewable power later this decade was not achievable, because of the cost.
This put the plant’s future at risk, and that risk applied to all Australian aluminium plants.
Anthony Albanese had three choices: Close the aluminium plants over time; change his energy policies, or undertake massive subsidies. Albanese chose the subsidisation route via carbon credits. It was a $2bn injection to save all our aluminium producers. His timing was dreadful.
Naturally the reptiles followed up with a snap of Satan himself, Anthony Albanese speaking to workers at Tomago Aluminium. Picture: Adam Yip/NewsWire
Meanwhile, the keen Keane was still muttering away ...
The AMP’s chief economist Shane Oliver said in a note on Tuesday, “Even if Australian exports are not exempted from US tariffs the direct economic impact will be minor … steel and aluminium exports to the US are just 0.03% of [Australian] GDP”.
As Oliver goes on to note, the real problem for Australia in Trump’s tariffs is in lower levels of global trade and a hit to Chinese and global GDP, which will flow through to lower demand for our exports to China and other important markets.
Our experience when China itself tried to bully Australia into line with tariffs and bans suggests how the impact might be muted.
Research by the US Studies Centre looked at the impact of the Chinese actions and it was highly varied across industries. Cotton, for example, thrived after the initial impact via new relationships with buyers in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. Cotton exports to Vietnam more than tripled between 2018 and 2022; by 2022, Australia was the country’s second-largest source of cotton. The benefits lasted beyond the end of China’s actions — in 2023, 36% of Australian cotton went to Vietnam.
China’s ban on Australian coal had minimal impact, especially once Russia’s attack on Ukraine precipitated a global energy price spike, with coal exporters finding buyers in Japan and Europe. The ban merely forced China to import cheaper, but lower-grade coal from Indonesia.
Barley producers also found new markets elsewhere, but prices were lower. The lifting of China’s restrictions saw shipments switch back to China and higher prices. And Australian wine exporters struggled as a result of China’s punitive tariffs due to a global wine glut.
What’s clear about the mad king’s aluminium tariffs is that he would be well advised to exempt Australian imports. America’s aluminium production capacity, which has been in long-term decline, simply can’t replace the millions of tonnes currently imported. The result, inevitably, will be soaring aluminium prices in the US. Prices are already on the rise and will feed through into crucial industries like car manufacturing, construction and packaging.
As for steel, Australia now ships little steel to America. The overwhelming supply of Australian-owned steel in the American market comes from BlueScope’s 1-million-tonne-a-year electric arc furnaces and rolling mills in Ohio. BlueScope, which is a serial user of Australia’s notorious protectionist “anti-dumping scheme”, is now America’s fifth biggest steel producer and in fact will be a major beneficiary of the higher tariffs on imports. Unsurprisingly, Bluescope’s share price has hit a two-month high.
It sounded like it was pretty much a gnat in a molehill pretending to be a mountain, and that there might be bigger issues ...
But Mein Gott was determined to press on ...
For starters, he's Gott to get rid of any talk of climate science and global warming, and as for those bloody renewables, drill, baby, drill ...
American aluminium producers are already complaining that Australia did not moderate its exports to the US as required under the original Trump deal.
This is a signal that aluminium is in a totally different basket to steel.
If Australia wants to keep its aluminium industry, it might need to abandon the subsidy and embrace low cost energy, US style.
That of course is politically impossible for the Albanese government. The two more painful alternatives will first involve another round of subsidisation to overcome both Australia’s high-cost energy strategy and the Trump tariffs or, second, long-term closure.
Dutton will almost certainly choose the low-cost energy strategy rather than closure or more subsidies, but it should be a major debating point at the next election if the Trump tariffs remain in place on aluminium.
In steel, the survival debate will be totally different.
The Trump tariffs on Chinese and Japanese steel will cause massive Asian spare capacity, and the imported cost of steel will slump. The Gupta group owned Whyalla steel plant has not kept up with its maintenance and suffers regular blast furnace closures. It will not survive a sustained avalanche of low-cost Chinese and Japanese construction steel. However, the group does have an excellent steel distribution business.
If Canberra allows Whyalla to collapse, then our building industry will always be subjected to the whims of other countries.
We must ask whether we want construction steel in our industrial base via Whyalla.
The reptiles paused for another exciting groin-tingling snap, A steel furnace at BlueScope’s Port Kembla steelworks. Picture: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg
With the government poised to take over an airline, Mein Gott fell agonisingly just short of the need to nationalise steel.
Instead he ended up in a state of tariff confusion and takeover, leaving the pond monumentally confused ...
BlueScope is now a big winner from the Trump tariffs and is helped in Australia by its branded Colorbond product. But Bunnings plans to dominate roof trusses in Australia, and it is conceivable that it could use this potential dominance longer term to challenge Colorbond with an imported “Bunningsbond”. All building suppliers in Australia are concerned at the emerging dominance of the retail giant Bunnings in the trade area.
Keeping Port Kembla steel alive — as distinct from BlueScope — will involve tariffs or some other mechanism if steel surpluses dominate Asia in the next few years.
There will be a lot of debate whether we should have steel as an important part of our industrial base, or whether it should be placed in the motor industry trash bin.
If we want to keep construction steel, BlueScope may be asked to take over Whyalla if no one else will buy it.
Nope, the pond couldn't make sense of it all, neither hide nor hair of it.
Tariffs, renewables, takeovers, Mein Gott seemed to be at something of a loss, and so was the pond ...
Get rid of steel, save steel, do tariffs, do subsidies, do takeovers, don't do takeovers, do Bunnings over, dote on BlueScope, save the mighty 'Gong, sell Whyalla short ...
Our Henry urgently needs to return tomorrow to make sense of the world by offering a disquisition on ordo amoris ...perhaps turning it into some kind of hierarchy of trade wars befitting medieval scholars, the Catholic church and Star Wars ...
Meanwhile, poor old infallible Pope was left to wonder about the runt in the litter...
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