In which the pond can only offer a triptych of quisling Lord Downer, the chainsaw Caterist and the Major, with the bromancer still MIA...

 

The wayward bromancer going MIA has left the pond in a crisis, in pure, distilled essence of panic mode...

Who amongst the reptiles could respond, analyse and explain away stories like that one in the Graudian, Trump pick for Pentagon says selling submarines to Australia would be ‘crazy’ if Taiwan tensions flare, Nominee for undersecretary for defense policy says Aukus deal to deliver Virginia class submarines could leave US sailors ‘vulnerable’

Sheesh, just a few cherry picks help explain the pond's panic. 

Could the liar from the Shire have perpetrated a major blunder and could the Albo splash of cash go awry?

One of Donald Trump’s top picks for the Pentagon says selling submarines to Australia under the Aukus agreement poses a “very difficult problem” for the US and could endanger its own sailors.
Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy – the number three post at the US Department of Defense – has previously admitted he is “skeptical” about Aukus and said this week he is worried selling submarines to Australia could leave US sailors “vulnerable” because the vessels won’t be “in the right place in the right time”...
...Colby argued, there remained “a very real threat of a conflict in the coming years”, particularly along the so-called first island chain – the first arc of islands out from the east Asian continental mainland coast – including Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines and Borneo.
“And our attack submarines … are absolutely essential for making the defence of Taiwan or otherwise a viable and practical option,” Colby told the committee.
“So if we can produce the attack submarines in sufficient number and sufficient speed, then great. But if we can’t, [supplying Australia] becomes a very difficult problem because we don’t want our servicemen and women to be in a weaker position and more vulnerable and, God forbid, worse because they are not in the right place in the right time.”
In August he tweeted: “Aukus, in principle, it is a great idea, but I have been very skeptical in practice. I remain skeptical, agnostic, as I put it, but more inclined based on new information I have gleaned. It would be crazy to have fewer SSNs Virginia-class [attack submarines] in the right place and time.”

The pond turned to today's lizard Oz for urgent help...

Lordy, lordy, somehow the Brisbane floods linked to Covid ...and over on the extreme far right? Nope, no help there, there's no substitute for the bromancer ...

Just Lord Downer and Major Mitchell on hand, what with the Caterist imagining he's Uncle Leon down under with a chainsaw and simpleton Simon getting his knickers in a knot over the pending election.

Luckily news from the west had quickly been swept under the rug, what with those bloody sandgropers inclined to socialism.

The pond must always play the cards the reptiles deal, so it was over to Lord Downer to sort things out in a way that Colonel Blimp himself would envy, Europe’s leaders are still in denial over Ukraine, Donald Trump not only has to deter an aggressive China but also needs to ensure Israel’s existence is not jeopardised by Iran. Rich Europe can deal with Russia with American back-up.

It sounds simple the way that Lord Downer puts it, easy peasy, and naturally there was a snap of the Cantaloupe Clown at one with Ukraine, US President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky meet in the Oval Office.

Pleasantries between dictators out of the way, Lord Downer got down with it ... which is to say play the role of quisling cheese-eating surrender monkey...

President Donald Trump deserves credit for forcing European leaders to do more about their own defence. It is a warning to Australia that it, too, needs to start pulling its weight to contribute to deterrence and the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region.
Since the end of World War II, Europe has been dependent on the US for its defence. Even after the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany, Europe still depended on the US.
As Trump has pointed out, the GDP of the EU is 10 times larger than Russia’s, so surely Europe can defend itself from Russia without being excessively dependent on the US.
After all, Britain and France are nuclear weapons states. Yet the only European armed forces that have any force projection capability are the British and French. For the rest, defence has not been a priority. While the US military and taxpayers cover the defence of Western Europe, Europe has been spending its money on expanded welfare programs and building windmills.
This was always going to catch up with them. The day was always going to come when an American president said that Europe had to learn to provide for its own defence and the US would back it up.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with urgent news from Sky Noise, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage claims it’s “absolutely crucial” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his American counterpart Donald Trump come to some sort of accommodation. “I think the absolute truth of where we are with this is that if the Americans were to walk away completely, that Starmer might find that the coalition of the willing doesn’t have that many members,” he told Sky News host Paul Murray. “So, what is ultimately absolutely crucial here is that Zelensky and Trump come to some sort of accommodation – and I think the US minerals deal is a very, very clever step in the right direction.”

Hang on, hang on, the last the pond had heard of Nige, the header ran Reform feud escalates as Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe trade public barbs, Richard Tice tries to calm party row in Sunday media round after pair attack each other in newspaper articles

And From Trump whisperer to trouble – angry Reform UK MPs turn on Farage, Internal row in party over ‘messianic’ leader becomes public amid competing members’ allegations of bullying and dirty tricks

Talk about making plans for Nigel ...

Just a few short weeks ago, Nigel Farage’s Reform party was riding high. It was consistently polling above Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative party and in some surveys had even edged ahead of the Labour government.
Donors who had previously handed over large amounts to the Tories were switching sides, while Farage was relishing having the ear of US president Donald Trump, touting himself as a far better representative to the leader of the free world than Keir Starmer.
But US leader’s behaviour (sic) towards Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has suddenly dented the appeal of being seen as pro-Trump, and in the past two days, civil war has broken out among Farage’s small group of MPs. First, Rupert Lowe used an interview with the Daily Mail to accuse his leader of being “messianic”, before the party responded by revealing that Lowe had been reported to the police for making physical threats against Reform’s chairman...
...Stephenson said she considered the charges against Lowe to be “trumped up” and spiteful, in response to Lowe’s challenge to the party. “Nobody was a bigger fan than me of Nigel Farage, but I think he has been an absolute disgrace,” she said. “He is a disrupter, but he isn’t very good at setting things up.
“Nigel just wants to run a protest party. We have no way of removing him as leader. We only have five MPs and if they can’t get along, how on earth can we run a country?
“He gets a great body of support and just slowly falls out with everybody and loses the best people.”

Why it sounds just like Pauline's party in her prime salad days, but never mind, on with Lord Downer selling off the family farm and selling out Ukraine...

European leaders have misunderstood the meaning of the NATO alliance. They seemed to think that NATO meant America covered their defence. Yet it is supposed to be an alliance of partners who all contribute to the defence of the West.
Europe has had plenty of warning. I was at the Munich security conference in February 2007 when President Vladimir Putin made his dramatic speech demanding the recognition of the return of Russia as a great power.
European leaders and foreign ministers were appalled, rightly seeing this as the end of endeavours to bind post-communist Russia to West. It’s true, it was a historic moment.
Just over a year later the Russians invaded Georgia. The separation between Russia and the West was well under way. It was clear that Russia was becoming increasingly belligerent using the defence of ethnic Russian minorities in neighbouring states as an excuse to intervene, including militarily. Fast forward to 2014 and Russia invaded Crimea and the eastern Donbas in Ukraine.
Given the growing threat of Russia, it is to say the least astonishing that the Europeans did nothing effectively to counter it.
Sure, they engaged in high-level diplomacy, but they continued to buy gas from Russia and did nothing to increase defence spending. They just sat back and hoped the Americans would cover any threat from Russia.
Even after Russia had occupied 10 per cent of Ukraine, including the strategic Crimean Peninsula, the German government led by Angela Merkel proceeded with the Nord Stream gas pipeline that was a financial bonanza for Russia.

Ah, the Germans, always the Germans, and so to a snap... Vladimir Putin dining with Angela Merkel at Adler Wirtschaft restaurant in Hattenheim, Germany, Octover, 2007.

Lord Downer's solution to the vexing problem? Give Vlad the sociopathic impaler some 20% of Ukraine and walk away ...

What were the Russians to think of all this? Not surprisingly they concluded the Europeans were weak and the Americans had plenty of other problems – not least China and the Middle East – on their hands.
It’s this weakness that led Putin to the conclusion he could invade the whole of Ukraine and get away with it.
Since then, the Europeans have provided substantial financial support to Ukraine and some military support. But remember, more than 80 per cent of all Western military equipment provided to Ukraine has come from the US. It has spent somewhere in the vicinity of $200bn on military hardware for the Ukrainians. Without the Americans, Ukraine would be lost to Russia.
As it is, the Russians have been able to take only about 18 per cent of the country.
So what is the European plan for ending the war? The Europeans profess outrage as Trump in his own astonishing way tries to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin to agree to a ceasefire.
But when I asked an EU ambassador in London recently what Europe’s alternative plan was, he surprised me. He said we should keep the war going for another year and by then the Russian economy would have collapsed. That’s some prediction! Half a million civilians and soldiers will have died in that period, hundreds of billions of dollars will have been spent, and somehow the Europeans believe China will stop providing Russia an economic lifeline.
That’s the problem with the Europeans: they haven’t thought this through.
When I’ve asked them whether they thought the Ukrainians could seize back not just the eastern Donbas but Crimea, they’ve said this was militarily impossible.
They’re right. To do that would require the direct military intervention of the Americans. That in turn would lead to all-out war between the US and Russia. For some reason, I would prefer Trump’s move towards a ceasefire than that particular option.
So if there is a ceasefire, the Europeans have finally realised they need to contribute. They can provide the guarantee that Zelensky will need and that guarantee will be in the form of peace enforcement forces.

Yes, yes, it's worked tremendously well already ...

Poor Brendan must be rolling in his grave. Just yesterday he was out and about in the lizard Oz with ...

The pond can ignore his infatuation with ethnic cleansing Gaza style to focus on matters Ukrainian ...

..Members of the online right love to call Zelensky a “welfare queen”, no doubt chuckling with self-satisfaction as they do so.
After the Trump-Zelensky shouting match, right-wing commentator Matt Walsh gloated that Trump had put this “international welfare queen” in his place.
Even Donald Trump Jr has called Zelensky an “ungrateful international welfare queen”.
It’s alarming that such juvenile playground taunts have become the stuff of semi-official chatter. It echoes, of course, what the left says about Israel: that it raids the American treasury to fund its infernal wars.
Neither the Ukraineophobes nor the Israelophobes demonstrate even the barest understanding of geopolitics, the fact it is in America’s interests to provide assistance to allies under assault.
Trump himself seems to have lost sight of this truth of world affairs. His tantrum-like pausing of military aid to Ukraine suggests he, too, is so blinded by the virtual caricature of Zelensky that he can no longer see the real Ukraine and how important its resistance to Russia is...
...Witness Trump’s rant about Zelensky “gambling with World War III … gambling with the lives of millions of people”.
I felt like I was going insane when I heard that. Mr President, Ukraine did not ask to be invaded by its brutish neighbour.

Poor Brendan, apparently unaware he's long been insane, but back at Lord Downer's camp there was another snap, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Finland's President Alexander Stubb, France's President Emmanuel Macron, Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, Romania's Interim President Ilie Bolojan and European Council President Antonio Costa.

That was a prelude to Lord Downer dumping the whole hot mess in the lap of Europe...

Britain and France already have signed up to that but – surprise, surprise – other Europeans seem hesitant.
The British Prime Minister and the French President have played a very good game recognising Europe needs to take more responsibility for the security of its own region.
The US, after all, not only has to deter an aggressive China but also needs to ensure Israel’s existence is not jeopardised by Iran. Rich Europe can deal with Russia with American back-up.
There’s a lesson in all of this for us. Our country too is a rich country, but the embarrassment we suffered over the circumnavigation of Australia by the Chinese warships recently demonstrates that we are not pulling our weight.
AUKUS is years away and we need effective capacity now, not just to depend on ringing up the American president if things get tough for us. We were able to intervene in East Timor to facilitate that country’s independence, we were able to sort out Solomon Islands, and we were able to do those things with minimal support from the Americans.

AUKUS is years away? Is that what they say about the never never?

Lord Downer sailed off into the sunset, content that he'd set a precedent with Ukraine ...

That didn’t weaken our alliance. The fact we could do things ourselves reinforced our value to the alliance. That’s what the Europeans should be doing right now in Ukraine. They should stop whingeing, be grateful for the generosity of Americans and make a proportional effort themselves.
Alexander Downer was foreign minister from 1996 to 2007 and high commissioner to the UK from 2014 to 2018. He is chairman of British think tank Policy Exchange.

Um, the Cantaloupe Caligula is a generous American?

And so to the Caterist. 

The Caterist is an expert Brisbane floods whisperer, but he ignored that skill so that this day he could become Lord Voldemort, armed with chain saw ...

Bottom line: We can’t afford the cost of bigger bureaucracy, Labor’s problem is that it has become as indebted to the public service as it is to the unions. It relies on the votes of those on the government’s payroll to make up for the falling number of Labor supporters who aren’t.

The reptiles began by trotting out a snap of a hapless apple islander, Premier Jeremy Rockliff speaks during the first sitting day for the house of assembly in the Tasmanian parliament for 2025. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

The pond didn't much mind. The pond has been thinking that if we offered Chairman Xi Tasmania and the perfidious socialist sandgropers, we might, Lord Downer style, save some of the eastern states furniture...

And so to biblical matters ...

The conversion of Saul of Tarsus was triggered by a flash in the sky and a voice from heaven on the road to Damascus. Jeremy Rockliff’s damascene conversion was prompted by economist Saul Eslake’s report of Tasmania’s state finances in 2024.
For the Premier, it wasn’t so much a blinding light as a statement of the blindingly obvious. Eslake warns that if the budget doesn’t return to surplus, state debt will rise to 25 per cent of the state’s domestic product by 2035. That would put Tasmania in the same league as Victoria, which set alarm bells ringing, obviously.
The Covid pandemic was the pretext for an unprecedented expansion of government during peacetime.
The ranks of state and federal public servants increased by 23 per cent between June 2019 and June 2024. The wage bill increased by 39 per cent.
Tasmania’s run of fiscal deficits highlights the danger of electing governments that feel compelled to keep busy. Its financial position can’t be blamed on factors beyond the government’s control.
On the contrary, the mess was almost entirely of the government’s own making.

The reptiles offered up prime Angus beefing from Goulburn on Sky down under ....Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor says the Albanese government’s new “36,000 Canberra-based public servants” is “too many”. “Labor’s added 36,000 Canberra-based public servants,” Mr Taylor told Sky News Australia. “We’ve said that’s too many; we’ve said that should be under 200,000. “We need to build businesses, not building bureaucracy, and that’s what we’ve seen under Labor.”

That triggered the Caterist into action ...

Eslake calculates that policy decisions worsened the net operating balance by a cumulative total of $5.5bn across the six years to 2022-23.
“In other words, if the government had not made any ‘policy decisions’ during this period, all else being equal, the general government sector would have recorded net operating surpluses,” he writes.
The message was not lost on Rockliff, who told parliament last week: “I firmly believe governments should not be judged by the number of laws they create and regulations they impose. Indeed, it should be the exact opposite. People want government out of their lives.”
It was too much for Greens leader Rosalie Woodruff.
“You just want fewer laws,” she said. “This is a pathetic far-right virtue signalling on your part, and we are honestly embarrassed for you. Will you put this reckless, radical rhetoric behind you and commit to approaching legislation like a sensible adult? Or will this parliament have to spend the rest of the term supervising you like a babysitter?”
The Tasmanian government had fewer than 45,000 public servants on its books at the start of the pandemic. Their ranks had swelled to 55,000 by June 2024.
How the extra 10,000 occupy their working day isn’t clear but we have it on the authority of Greens state MP Cecily Rosol that the work of every one of them is vital.
“There is no such thing as a non-essential position,” Rosol told the Tasmanian parliament on Wednesday.

Just as you'd expect from a man who each Monday contributes a non-essential column to the lizard Oz. What on earth is she talking about? Being non-essential in every way is an essential aspect of being a reptile. 

Then came a snap of the delusional one ... Greens leader Rosalie Woodruff and party MPs at a media conference on Parliament Lawns in Hobart.

Pathetic. What was needed was something inspirational, an image designed to stir the Caterist loins ...

That did the trick, and the Caterist was ready for a a slash and burn ...

Since Rosol is a former nurse, it’s not hard to understand her anger at the Liberal state government’s hiring freeze on ancillary staff. Yet Rosol wasn’t just referring to frontline staff. In her mind, the salary of each and every bureaucrat is sacred.
“Administration staff create pathways for good organisation,” she told parliament. “Managers see the big picture.”
Woodruff and Rosol illustrate the mindset Peter Dutton must overturn if he is to fulfil his promise to reduce the size of the bureaucracy. The screeching won’t come only from the Greens.
These days Labor’s rusted-on supporters are likelier to be members of the laptop class than the working class. Anthony Albanese has rewarded them richly since he became Prime Minister. Between June 2022 and June 2024, the Australian Public Service workforce grew by 44 per cent. Sadly, that’s not a typo.
Albanese inherited a workforce of 254,000 that had grown to 365,00 by last June according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data. The wage bill rose by 52 per cent from $24.5bn to $37.3bn.
Dutton and his Treasury spokesman, Angus Taylor, have their work cut out. Dutton is on safe ground in targeting 36,000 public service jobs in Canberra, which is the civic equivalent of Collingwood – loved by a few, hated by many.
Nevertheless, Labor’s Assistant Employment Minister, Andrew Leigh, leapt to the bureaucrats’ defence citing a backlog of claims at the Department of Veterans Affairs to justify keeping the bureaucrats in jobs. Yet few, if any, jobs are likely to be lost in Veterans Affairs, which employs fewer than 750 people in Canberra.
Redundancies are likelier to occur in the Health Department, an agency dedicated to administration rather than service delivery. The number of public servants in the department increased by 25 per cent from 5693 to 7135 in the first two years of the Albanese government.
By way of comparison, staff numbers increased by a mere 11 per cent in the first two years of the pandemic.

At this point, the reptiles introduced a very big snap, Economist Saul Eslake in Hobart. Picture: Chris Kidd

That's better, reduced in size, to make space for a final Caterist rant featuring a sublime post-modern flourish of irony...

Labor’s problem is that it has become as indebted to the public service as it is to the unions. It relies on the votes of those on the government’s payroll to make up for the falling number of Labor supporters who aren’t.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher had no choice but to stand up for the right of public servants to work from home last week after the Coalition had pledged to drive the bureaucrats back to the office.
“The feedback I get from managers and from individual employees is positive,” she said. “It allows them to balance their other responsibilities and still perform their work.”
Gallagher’s comments may shore up her vote as an ACT senator but they are poison to those in jobs where things are done rather than merely administered.
Those who work from home are primarily managers and professionals, not the people who fill and empty warehouses, dig holes, pour concrete or supervise checkout counters.
It is their votes Labor is about to lose at the next election.
Labor’s new heartland is in the inner-metropolitan areas and clusters around universities. Its primary constituency is the people Philip Roth ironically called “deep thinkers” in his 1997 novel American Pastoral: “People who’d never manufactured anything or seen anything manufactured, who did not know what things were made of or how a company worked, who, aside from a house or a car, had never sold anything and didn’t know how to sell anything, who’d never hired a worker, fired a worker, trained a worker, been fleeced by a worker – people who knew nothing of the intricacies of the risks of building a business or running a factory but who nonetheless imagined that they knew everything worth knowing.”

The meta-irony in all that only became clear with the sign-off Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.

Yep, here's a man who imagines he knows everything worth knowing, including the movement of flood waters in Brisbane quarries, and who's main contribution to the world has been to scribble columns for the lizard Oz and find shelter in a quango think tank ...blathering on about the need to manufacture or see some things manufactured, when his whole career has been dedicated to the manufacturing of bullshit ...

He's in good company... what with the immortal Rowe coming out with this splendid portrait to accompany a weekend story, and more of Steve anon...

What an excellent introduction to the final part of the triptych for today, the Major rambling on in the lizard Oz in his usual way, with Trump 2.0 deserves no more or less than fair scrutiny from the media, Trump’s second term is already a success globally, insofar as challenging the madder agenda of identity politics that consumed the Democrats under President Joe Biden.

Already a success? Throwing Ukraine under the bus, and generating chaos and confusion is a success because he's indulged in DEI and trans bashing?

Back in the day, Major Mitchell was ready to find a commie Ruski under any bed, as celebrated in a Crikey story reproduced here ...

It seems those days might be gone, he might be ready to toss it all in so he can share a bed with Vlad the sociopathic Impaler.

The reptiles attempted an initial distraction, but the pond had already covered the plans they were making for Nigel, Former Reform UK candidate Mayuran Senthilnathan says media commentators in the United Kingdom are having a “meltdown” over Donald Trump’s “isolationism”. “I’m a big fan of Trump’s domestic policies. I think there are some serious concerns about his foreign policy,” Mr Senthilnathan told Sky News Australia. “However, in Britain in general, we are having media commentators almost having a meltdown, enraged at the isolationism that Trump seems to be introducing for America. “What’s is done really is exposed how pathetic and how weak Britain and the European nation states are.”

Lord Downer lives, and never mind that the Cantaloupe Caligula might have emboldened a few rogues, what with him already having an eye on Canada, Greenland and Panama ...

The Major ran through a few pet peeves, only to suspend judgement ...

US President Donald Trump has polarised the media since his first election in 2016.
Then, as now, many of his media critics and admirers jumped too early in their assessments of him.
Without Covid-19, his first term would have ended a success with strong economic growth and the lowest rates of African-American unemployment since World War II. He kept America off the battle field, sealed the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain and United Arab Emirates and was unquestionably a good president for US-Australia relations.
The Democrat-left establishment – and big city media, big tech and the Obama-era intelligence community – undermined Trump from the start with the bogus Russiagate story.
It gave The New York Times and Washington Post lots of new young online subscribers who wanted confirmation bias about Trump. It also killed the credibility of many journalists.
Despite a powerful performance last Wednesday afternoon (AEDT) during his address to a joint sitting of the Senate and the House, it is too early to judge Trump’s second term, despite the high ratings he gave himself.
This column was appalled by last week’s White House Oval Office press conference with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
But it was unwise to judge too early: only five days after slapping down a leader many in the free world regard as a hero, Trump on Wednesday welcomed a letter from Zelensky that day asking for a resumption of peace talks and negotiations for a joint US-Ukraine deal on rare earths in Ukraine.

Yes, it's far too early to judge, as always King Donald is playing 5D chess, and this was but one example, Volodymyr Zelensky stands his ground against Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office meeting. Picture: AFP

At this point the Major began to have a few saucy doubts and fears ...

Trump, always a fan of strong leaders, seems to cut Russian President Vladimir Putin inordinate slack. This column reckons Putin is a murderous gangster who may just be the richest man in the world when we find out how much of his poor country’s wealth he has plundered.
Those making excuses for Trump’s threats to Ukraine need to remember Zelensky represents his country’s interests, not America’s. And his country in 1994 signed up to international treaties with Russia, the US and UK to respect Ukraine’s borders.
In return, Ukraine surrendered all its nuclear weapons: no small thing given it then had the third largest nuclear stockpile on earth, behind Russia and the US.
This column reckons Zelensky would be mad to agree to any peace deal without strong guarantees against future attacks by Putin.
A reading of the full transcript of discussions between Trump, Vance and Zelensky provides context. We suspect many journalists did not read it, relying instead on the fireworks of the 10 minutes that blew up the end of the meeting.
It is clear that for much of the meeting Trump believed Zelensky was already on board with the proposed minerals deal.
Trump is wary of Ukraine’s ambition to join NATO because Russia would not accept a NATO state on its border and the alliance could potentially force the US into any future conflict with Russia to defend Ukraine as a NATO member.
This is Trump’s World War III scenario. Trump is about peace, prosperity and reducing government spending and US debt.
Yet where Trump’s second term is already a success, globally, is in challenging the madder agenda of identity politics that consumed the Democrats under president Joe Biden.

A success? He's not so much about peace and prosperity and reducing government, as mangling government and trying to mediate peace amongst his minions ...

The pond sighed ... yet another in Stewart Lee's ongoing series Trump has turbocharged the news cycle and I'm struggling to keep up ... (latest episode Trump has microwaved my Cornetto of hope).

FWIW, you can keep up with the Beast rip, and with the NY Times report by way of the archive ...

Enough of Steve and Uncle Leon already ...

The reptiles were busy celebrating calypso crypto corruption with an AV offering, President Trump hosted the first White House Crypto Summit a day after he signed an executive order to establish a government reserve for Bitcoin.

It was the last interruption to the Major, and he seized the chance to bore on full speed ...

The business world is better off without DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). Business leaders have welcomed the triumphant return of merit.
Sensible mainstream opinion supports the end of mis-gendered sport and a clear statement of biological truth in gender. Most Americans applaud the return of common sense to US border policy, proper support for policing and the President’s determination to clamp down on drugs killing 100,000 Americans every year.

The triumphant return of merit? Per David French in the NY Times, Does Trump's Cabinet Look Like a Meritocracy to You? (archive link)

How committed is the Trump administration to the meritocracy, really? No one should look at Pete Hegseth or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard or Kash Patel and think that Trump has scoured America to find the best and brightest to lead his new administration.

The contrast between Hegseth and Joe Biden’s outgoing defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, is profound. Austin, who is Black, served as a battalion commander, a brigade commander, a division commander and Centcom commander before he was selected to lead the Pentagon.

Of course, those qualifications are no guarantee that a person would be an effective secretary of defense, but Austin is vastly more qualified than Hegseth, who was barely confirmed after three Republican senators voted against his nomination. No one should denigrate Hegseth’s service. He served his country honorably in combat operations overseas. But so have hundreds of thousands of other Americans.

If we’re applying the colorblind analysis that Trump allegedly demands, he just downgraded our secretary of defense. He’s promoted an unqualified man to one of the most powerful and important jobs in the United States.

Trump’s cure for D.E.I. isn’t a true meritocracy, but rather affirmative action for the MAGA movement. Providing preferences for populists might be a natural consequence of Trump’s political victory, but it is not an improvement on the status quo.

Talk about the triumphant return of merit...

As for Canada trying to cut off a few pounds of fentanyl ...

Sorry, the pond mustn't keep interrupting, or we could be here all day ...

Many will applaud Trump’s plans to reboot the US car and ship building industries.
Here we arrive at the central contradiction of Trump: US businesses were the main drivers and beneficiaries of globalisation. They relocated factories to places with cheap labour and their profits soared. Much of the US car industry has moved to Mexico. US textile manufacturing moved to China, then Bangladesh and Colombia. Computer chip-making, once the domain of Silicon Valley, moved to Taiwan.
This supercharged the profits of corporate America, cut the prices of consumer goods to working Americans and left US business innovators to focus on much higher-value production in new technology.
The world’s biggest companies no longer make cars or steel. They make iPhones, develop software programs that have culminated in artificial intelligence, or they build global audiences for social media and streaming of content.
The world’s leading companies by market capitalisation at the end of October were: Apple ($US3.56 trillion), Nvidia ($US3.23 trillion), Microsoft ($US3.11 trillion), Alphabet, the parent company of Google, ($US2.05 trillion), Amazon ($US1.95 trillion), Meta ($US1.48 trillion) and Berkshire Hathaway ($US1 trillion).
The only traditional US industrial company in the global top 10 is Indiana pharmaceuticals giant Eli Lilly, with a market cap of $US868bn.
While the US sharemarket is down over the past few weeks, the top five in October each had a larger market cap than Australia’s annual GDP ($US1.7 trillion) and all dwarfed the market cap of the entire Australian stock exchange ($US1 trillion).
Many of these companies did not exist before globalisation and they are the biggest beneficiaries of open international markets. Yet their success has left Middle America behind as unskilled jobs in manufacturing moved offshore.
Trump believes the key to reviving Middle America is the reimposition of tariffs to bring manufacturing back to the US. And he thinks tariffs are a revenue honey pot for government that will allow tax cuts and perhaps eventually balance the federal budget.
The trouble is that tariffs raise prices and reward inefficiency, and countries whose exports to the US are penalised this way introduce reciprocal tariffs against American exports.
Trump was sure in Wednesday’s speech that the US’s farmers would appreciate the tariffs he will impose on imported agricultural goods.
This ignores history: the US Civil War was not just about slavery. The north was dominated by industrialists who wanted protection from European imports. The farmers of the south wanted free trade so the costs of imported inputs used to grow their cotton and other goods could be kept lower.

Oh the pond must interrupt to applaud the Major for making a stand with Dixie ... as with the Colonel, so the Major ...

 

 

Back in those days a rabbit could do drag and nobody would mind ...

And so to a few final words of wisdom, as the Major does his best to avoid a recession in the USA and perhaps in the world  ...

Economists say Trump’s plan will boost inflation and hurt American consumers as well as producers that use imported components.
Yet this column can see one counter-argument and suspects China, globalisation’s biggest beneficiary, can too: the US is not a particularly open economy. That is, trade is a much smaller fraction of US GDP than it is for many trading nations.
In the US, two-way trade is 27 per cent of GDP compared with Germany (90 per cent), France (68 per cent), China (37 per cent) and even Australia (48 per cent).
Trump may also be using tariff threats to demand the removal of other non-tariff barriers used in places such as Europe to protect inefficient farmers, and by China, where investment rules for foreigners are opaque.

Hmm, the pond can remember when King Donald shoved aid down the throats of US farmers as compensation for his tariff follies, and might yet do it again, per Forbes: Trump Tariff Aid To Farmers May Again Exceeed U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost ...

The pond could go on, but fatigue always sets in, so it's time to wrap up proceedings with an immortal Rowe celebrating the new gilded age ...