In which there's our Henry, some time with the Lynch mob, and last and least, Lloydie of the Amazon ...

 

Fair or not, the pond is routinely sent into a frenzy just by glancing at headlines ... like this one ...

You can see whether the pond is being fair or not by visiting the archive, Fair or Not, Zelensky Is Angering Trump. Is His Style Hurting Ukraine?

Fair or not, Vlad the sociopathic Impaler is still doing business; fair or not, the pond is routinely sent into a frenzy by the reptiles at the lizard Oz.

The redeeming feature is that they rarely bother to hide their prime loonacy behind NY Times both siderism ...

They wear their bonkers, barking mad approach on their always agitated, upset, snowflakey far right sleeves ...

That was hardly surprising for a top of the front page digital offering. 

Anything missing? In the usual reptile way, this yarn got disappeared to the cornfield ...

You can of course head to the ABC, or read the report's press release, with link to the report, “More than a human can bear”: Israel's systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023

But the reptiles have never much minded ethnic cleansing or attempts at genocide, and meanwhile over on the extreme far right there was an abundance of riches...

Too many to digest in a sitting. The pond had to wave away the mints and pick favourites.

The pond could never abandon our Henry, expert in a historical understanding of bucket repair, and the Lynch mob remains an essential way to continue the defamation of the University of Melbourne.

Luckily Lloydie of the Amazon was a mere two minute read, so he could make the cut, but the pond had to drawn a line somewhere, and the line fell on Mark Steyn.

It's a measure of things that the reptiles, now so cocooned in the hive mind that no-one seems to want to scribble for them, that they should offer up a reheated Quad rant, a rant which first appeared in the Quad back on 26th February. 

Sure it was an existential howl of pain, full Ginsberg, as Quad ranters are inclined to do, but the pond has better things to contemplate.

Like our Henry ... Learning from the past is hard enough; it is impossible when we distort it, Claims that the Monroe Doctrine justifies handing Vladimir Putin Ukraine don’t stand up to scrutiny.

The pond trusts that students remember The First Law of Henry: “There is no argument that cannot be bolstered by citing a long-deceased notable who had no direct knowledge or experience of the subject under debate.”

Is it due for revision? 

Our hole in bucket man is experiencing a trauma induced by the mango Mussolini ... US President Donald Trump gives a thumb's up after stepping off Air Force One.

The pond understands and sympathises; the mere sight of King Donald and president Leon flogging cars from the White House sale yard can induce a wave of nausea in the pond.

Our Henry is so afflicted he even has a few sharp words to say about the grave Sexton ... 

According to Michael Sexton in these pages, “since the Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed in 1823 by the US, it has designated both North and South America to be US spheres of influence” (“Only US and Russian can end the bloodshed in Ukraine”, 28/2).
Nor is Sexton alone: from the moment Donald Trump announced his stance on Ukraine, the Monroe Doctrine has been presented in publications that range from The Washington Post to Foreign Affairs as legitimating efforts by great powers to carve up the world.
Claiming that president James Monroe asserted an American “sphere of influence” is obviously anachronistic: the term was coined only in 1869 and it was not until the 1880s that the concept entered widespread use. What is more important, however, is that sweeping assertions about the doctrine are both factually misleading and misinterpret the lessons of its evolution.
That three, non-consecutive, paragraphs in Monroe’s end-of-year message to congress would acquire far-reaching symbolic importance was hardly apparent.

Dear sweet long absent lord, the grave Sexton's ears given a boxing, and there's a bonus historical flourish, US president James Monroe.

Our Henry scours history to make his point, scribbling in the shadow of a narcissistic sociopath wanting to do a Vlad the Impaler ...

Throw in Canada and Greenland, and our Henry was off to the paranoid 'sphere of influence' races ...

Tucked away in a 6397-word address that covered issues such as the operations of the Post Office and repairs to the Cumberland Road, the 954 words that eventually became known as the Monroe Doctrine were a response to immediate fears and pressures.
With memories of the War of 1812 still fresh, the concerns partly reflected anxieties about Britain’s intentions. The main trigger, however, was the Holy Alliance’s Troppau Circular of 1820, in which Europe’s reactionary monarchies – Austria, Russia, Prussia and later France – agreed to suppress any liberal reforms. In April 1823, France, acting on the Troppau commitments, intervened to quash the Spanish constitutionalists and restore King Ferdinand VII.
France’s move shocked Washington. A cabinet discussion concluded that the Holy Alliance would reduce South America to “subjection by military force”, readily suppressing constitutional governments that were no stronger than “Chinese shadows”, flickering “on the stage (before) passing off like Banquo’s descendants in Macbeth”.
Public opinion echoed the anxiety. When the South American states won their independence, a wave of enthusiasm had swept the US: “Behold!” Thomas Jefferson exclaimed, “another example of man … bursting the chains of his oppressor”. Now that triumph was seen as a possibly fleeting moment in a still undecided struggle between a liberal “New World” and a reactionary “Old World”.
The conservative powers, John Calhoun argued, “are on one side, and we the other, of political systems wholly irreconcilable. The two cannot exist together: one or the other must gain the ascendancy.” That is why Monroe’s 1823 message asserted that “the political system of the allied powers is essentially different from that of America”; the message’s “one object” was consequently to ensure South America’s new nations could freely choose to “be governed by republican institutions”.

It isn't Thucydides, but it does seem motivated by current traumas, especially US President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky meet in the Oval Office.

Our Henry has a bee in his bonnet about Vlad the sociopathic Impaler and who can blame him? 

That bee sent the hole in bucket man back in time to trash Teddy, and if you read something like this ...

How Teddy Roosevelt’s Belief in a Racial Hierarchy Shaped His Policies, His conviction that white men of European descent were innately superior informed his actions on matters from national parks to foreign policy.

... who can blame him?

That principle was the antithesis of treating those nations as subordinates, much less conquering them as Vladimir Putin seeks to do in Ukraine. And while it would take too long to recount the principle’s tumultuous, often inconsistent, application in the 19th century, it is a striking fact that South American liberals were among its staunchest supporters.
To say that is not to deny that the US did intervene, including by force, in South America. But despite myriad attempts to reinterpret the doctrine, its anti-colonial character was always vigorously reasserted – not least, late in the century, by the powerful Anti-Imperialist League, whose supporters included former presidents from both parties.
A material change did occur, however, with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, whom Trump venerates. Convinced that the great global conflict was not between monarchical and republican systems of government but between “manly” civilised peoples and their “impotent” and uncivilised counterparts, Roosevelt was stung by British criticisms that the US did not do enough to “enforce any order” in South America.
His closest advisers recommended announcing a “Roosevelt Doctrine” that would reflect his 1905 inaugural address, in which he stated: “We have become a great nation … and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities.”
But always the canny politician, he sought to present the principle that “chronic wrongdoing … in the Western Hemisphere … (may) force the United States … to exercise an international police power” as a mere “corollary of the Monroe Doctrine”.
Congress soon forced him to back down. Nothing, he said, “could be further from the truth” than the idea that his so-called corollary “implied … a right to exercise some kind of protectorate over the countries to whose territory that doctrine applies”. Indeed, after that, the term “Monroe Doctrine” virtually disappeared from Roosevelt’s vocabulary.

The reptiles inserted a snap designed to goad our Henry ... Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with the governor of Arkhangelsk region Alexander Tsybulsky.

It sent our Henry even deeper down the Teddy rabbit hole ...

However, the “clarification” didn’t eliminate his imperialist instincts. Denounced by Mark Twain as “insane” – “always showing off (in) a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for an audience” – he multiplied his interventions while claiming they would restore peace, thus allowing the US to disengage.
The results were disastrous. Cavalierly ignoring national rights and aspirations bred unending conflicts, dragging subsequent administrations, however reluctantly, into quagmires.
To make things worse, Roosevelt’s ardent protectionism, which was integral to his “new nationalism”, along with his oft-repeated belief that “reciprocity must be treated as the handmaiden of protection”, shattered relations with Canada, provoked tariff escalation across the continent and legitimated moves towards closed trading blocs worldwide.
It is true that Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War.
But it is also true that by effectively excluding China from a process that dismembered its territory, those negotiations encouraged the Japanese imperialism that culminated in the horrors of the Pacific War.
In the end, they proved to be another example of what historian Jeremi Suri has described as Roosevelt’s “intoxication with power and exaggerated sense of his own superhuman capabilities” – as were his aspirations to commercial and political supremacy over America’s neighbours.

That last line seems clearly aimed at the Cantaloupe Caligula, and then even more bizarrely, the reptiles and our Henry turned to the new dealing Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Even a smidgeon of praise for FDR from our Henry was likely to induce a profound toxic shock in the pond...

It took until the administration of his distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for those aspirations to be decisively ditched and a gradual process of trade liberalisation set under way. Any notion that US policy reflected spheres of influence vanished then, too, with the clearest sign of change being the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947.

Dear sweet long absent lord, and barber Harry too?

Drawing the lessons of the 1930s, Harry Truman argued that the conflict between freedom and dictatorship had to be seen in global, not local, terms. Whatever its triumphs and tragedies in South America and elsewhere, it was a sense of that global struggle, not a hemispheric mindset, that subsequently shaped US foreign policy.
All that now seems behind us, with potentially ominous consequences. We are, in other words, confronted with a drastic change, not with the reinstatement of longstanding, broadly accepted, doctrines.
There are, for sure, conservatives who endorse that change; and they are of course free to argue their case. But what they should not be free to do is to caricature history – as the left so often does. Learning from the past is hard enough; it is impossible when we distort it.

How cruel is that? Comparing the grave Sexton to a distorting leftist? 

Is this what TDS has produced in the lizard Oz, angry reptiles scratching and clawing each other, citing history for support?

Where will it all end?

Nah, the pond could never get so lucky ...

It was a relief to turn to the Lynch mob, and help traduce the University of Melbourne's reputation. It's clearly not a home for academics with some kind of redeeming touch of sanity

Want to understand Trump? Forget tariffs — it’s all about culture, Trump is using economics to wage a culture war. Despite his transactional reputation – that he will Make America Wealthy Again – Trump is fighting on a different battlefield. Winning is measured by the recapture of cultural terrain.

No wonder the Lynch mob avoided the notion of winning on the stock exchange...

The reptiles countered with a ketamine-fuelled capitalist dreaming ... the White House turned into a car lot, US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk speak to the press as they stand next to a Tesla vehicle on the South Portico of the White House.

The Lynch mob began with a barb that might well have been directed at our Henry ...

Is the whole of Australia suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? 

It turned out that the Lynch mob also might have been suffering a little TDS ...

The President’s tariffs on us will now proceed. Did we ever imagine buddying up to Donald Trump would avoid this?
Malcolm Turnbull is possibly too present in our politics. But it is hard to criticise his stance on Trump. He called this one right. The economists of aluminium and steel can devise ways to lessen Trump’s blow. But we can hardly stop this one landing. Turnbull’s demand that we stand up to Trump, and inevitably fail, is a better psychological place to be than standing back and being shafted anyway. Trump’s chaotic revolution can’t be stalled, or Australia exempted from its penurious effects, by better mateship. Being “mates” mattered not much this week.
This rebellion against globalisation – which he has been promising for a decade and more – is going to play out, and no amount of middle-power harrumphing can forestall it. Anthony Albanese shirtfronting Trump just isn’t going to work. Penny Wong’s deepest scowl, terrifying to ordinary mortals, will do no good.
Getting Trump to back down would be beyond even Kevin Rudd’s brilliant man-management skills. Better personal chemistry is just not going to cut it.

The reptiles decided to make the piece more important by inserting huge snaps of Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd...

The Lynch mob decided to go the "much deeper forces" routine... strangle the pond in the shallows before things get too deep ...

There are much deeper forces at work. One is the culture war, which has now taken on global dimensions. Second is the gathering of systemic forces that Trump may struggle to contain.
Trump is waging a culture war in the guise of a war about tariffs. We need to stop calling out Trump’s economic illiteracy. The Wall Street Journal has been doing a lot of this. Its editorials offer compelling diagnoses of Trump’s bad maths. 

Ah, the WSJ, a splendid example of the Emeritus Chairman doing FAFO, as in How Do You Like the Trade War Now? Trump is furious that Canada won’t take his tariffs lying down. (archive link)

It was a doozie ...

President Trump wanted a trade war with the world, and Americans are getting it, good and hard. Stock prices continued to decline on Tuesday amid the latest Canada-U.S. tariff tit-for-tat. By the end of the day the two sides were talking about a temporary truce, but who knows which side of the tariff bed Mr. Trump will wake up on Wednesday?
North Americans awakened Monday to the news that Ontario premier Doug Ford said he was raising the price of his province’s electricity exports to the U.S. by 25% in response to Mr. Trump’s on-and-off 25% tariffs on Canada. That’s a hit to consumers in the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.
Mr. Trump went ballistic, even by his standards. Canada “must immediately drop their Anti-American Farmer Tariff of 250% to 390% on various U.S. dairy products,” Mr. Trump said on Truth Social. He said he’d double his metals tariffs on Canada to 50%. And oh, “the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State.”
Nice of him to concede, if obliquely, that his trade war with Canada makes no sense. His exhortation that Canada become a U.S. state is a tacit acknowledgment that the two economies are deeply integrated. His splendid little tariff war will harm businesses and consumers on both sides of the border.
The U.S. sources about two-thirds of its primary aluminum and 60% of scrap aluminum imports from Canada. Both are used by secondary U.S. aluminum manufacturers and fabricators, which oppose Mr. Trump’s tariffs. They have a hard enough time competing against lower-cost producers in China and Turkey.
Canada makes up a smaller share of U.S. steel consumption (about 6%). But Mr. Trump’s tariffs will still raise costs for steel users that depend on Canadian supplies. Hot-rolled coil steel prices are up a third since Mr. Trump took office because U.S. manufacturers like Cleveland-Cliffs and Nucor have raised prices in anticipation of tariffs.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said over the weekend that the President’s tariffs would make some foreign products more expensive but “American products will get cheaper.” Huh? Companies that use foreign components will have to raise prices or swallow narrower profit margins. Does Mr. Lutnick understand, well, commerce?
Domestic manufacturers that compete with foreign goods will raise their prices to take advantage of the protectionism to increase their margins. A study in the American Economic Review found that consumers paid $817,000 for each new manufacturing job created by Mr. Trump’s washing machine tariffs in his first term.
And Mr. Trump is only getting started as he prepares to take his trade war global. He promised Tuesday to “substantially increase” tariffs on cars on April 2, which he said would “essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada.” So first he whacks U.S. auto makers with tariffs that raise their production costs, then he tries to shield them from foreign competition by whacking American consumers.
Ontario’s Mr. Ford at least showed some maturity late Tuesday, saying he’ll suspend his 25% tax on electricity pending talks. He and Mr. Lutnick plan to meet Thursday about renewing the USMCA trade agreement, which comes up for review next year. Stocks pared some of their losses after the news.
The trouble with trade wars is that once they begin they can quickly escalate and get out of control. All the more so when politicians are nearing an election campaign, as Canada now is. Or when Mr. Trump behaves as if his manhood is implicated because a foreign nation won’t take his nasty border taxes lying down.
We said from the beginning that this North American trade war is the dumbest in history, and we were being kind.

But when you've got Faux Noise pushing tariffs and the mango Mussolini, who is really the dumbest in history?

The Lynch mob ignored all that to keep the culture wars routine going ...

But this misses the point of his surge through the institutions of the global deep state. He is using economics to wage a culture war. Despite his transactional reputation – that he will Make America Wealthy Again – Trump is fighting on a different battlefield. Winning is measured by the recapture of cultural terrain.
MAGA doesn’t want a redistribution of wealth but of cultural power and of social status, from a woke managerial class back to blue-collar workers. Farmers of the Midwest will certainly lose money because of Trump’s tariff war. They did during Trump 1.0. Their reward is cultural renewal.
Illinois and Iowa are America’s soybean capitals. Their farmers will be among the hardest hit by tariffs. But Trump won Iowa in November by over 13 points (55.7 per cent to 42.5). While he lost Illinois to Kamala Harris, rural Illinois was deep red. Its residents have begun a campaign to secede and join, possibly, Indiana and Idaho. This is a sociocultural phenomenon, not an economic one.
JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) documents less an economic dispossession than a collapse of civil society. The rust-belt Ohio, from which he escapes, made him “a cultural emigrant” among the DC elite. The Trump-Vance cabinet is full of rich men for whom money has declining salience; they are culture warriors.

Speaking of culture wars, the WSJ had a different view on a related matter, Mahmoud Khalil and His Green Card, Terrorist support is cause for revocation, but not unpopular speech. (archive link)

The Trump Administration’s decision to revoke the green-card immigration status of anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil is becoming a cause celebre, for better and maybe worse. Mr. Khalil may deserve deportation, but he also deserves due process, and revoking green cards as a policy would have costs beyond any individual’s fate.
The latter is what Mr. Trump seems to have in mind. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again,” he elaborated on X.com. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted that the Administration “will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
The deportation of green-card holders shouldn’t be taken lightly. They are permanent residents who sought legal approval and were vetted through official channels. Millions of people consider the green card a guarantee of secure U.S. residency and build their lives around it. The Khalil case has many green-card holders wondering if they could also be grabbed and deported for espousing controversial political views. That’s why the facts of his case and a day in court matter.

And so on, and so much for the culture wars.

Meanwhile, the reptiles decided to slip in a little AV comedy distraction ...Comedian Alex Stein says Donald Trump is “winning” by threatening tariffs on other countries around the world. Mr Stein told Sky News Digital Presenter Gabriella Power that the United States has been “giving away” money left and right. “We’ve wasted so much money on not even helping other countries, basically just wasting it.”

That's comedy? This is more like comedy ...Comedian Marc Maron Calls Bill Maher Trump’s ‘B***h’ (archive link)

Marc Maron is making his unfiltered feelings about fellow comedian and podcaster Bill Maher known. And Maron’s not impressed by how Maher has comported himself at the start of the second Donald Trump administration.
“Are you going to be like Bill Maher, you know, ‘I’m going to agree with some of the things that Trump is doing,’” Maron said on his WTF podcast this week during a political conversation with his guest, comedian and former CNN host W. Kamau Bell. “It’s like, dude, you’re a b---h.”
The host continued to make fun of Maher for finding points of connection with members of the MAGA coalition, imitating him as he added, “‘I like Kid Rock.’ And now you’re gonna blow him with a slightly disdainful look on your face? That’s who you are?”
...Prior to the 2024 election, Maron drew widespread attention in the comedy world for a newsletter piece in which he accused conservative comedians of “normalizing fascism” by hosting Trump on their podcasts. “The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers,” he wrote at the time. “Whether or not they are self-serving or true believers in the new fascism is unimportant.”
Speaking now to those comedians, including Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and others, Maron said, “You’ve got to own that. Either you know you are and you’re in it for the grift. Or you just believe that s--t, which is fine, but even believing that s--t at this point, it’s like, well this is fundamentally anti-democratic.”
As for the MAGA comedians who showed up at Trump’s inauguration, Maron added, “Dude, you’ve just been bought. And I don’t think you even sold yourself for that much.”

The pond has long yearned to call Maher a bitch, but won't ask about the asking price for the Lynch mob ... still yearning for the culture war days of yore ...

America has some of the wealthiest universities in the world. Harvard’s $US50bn ($79.4bn) endowment makes it number one. (For comparison: the University of Melbourne, Australia’s No. 1, has an endowment of less than $US1bn) Trump is not targeting Ivy League wealth, but its culture. Ending DEI and reducing the number of genders back to two has no economic rationale, beyond the small cost-cutting both measures will entail.
The DEI academic industrial complex does not appal Trump supporters for its financial costs but for how it is used by progressives to police the culture. DEI commissars, embedded at every major American institution, enforce a left-wing ideology. Resisting it now has a popular pay-off for Republicans.
The most effective campaign ad in the 2024 election reminded ordinary voters that “Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald Trump in for you”. Democrats had no way of countering this.
Columbia University, the mecca of American anti-Semitism, is in Trump’s sights not because of its profits. What is $400m returned to federal coffers? He means to effect a campus revolution. The objective is cultural seizure – or at least the beginning of a long march back through elite institutions.
Take Trump to task for his mercantilism. But remember, tariffs are a means toward a bigger end: the remaking of American and, if he dreams big, of international society. And herein lies the rub. By internationalising his culture war, he is mobilising forces against himself more potent than a weak Democratic Party and its DEI bureaucracy.
“The Global Deep State” sounds the stuff of conspiracy theories. There is not a sinister Davos cabal plotting to do Trump in. But there are markets. And so far, they do not like what Trump has wrought.

The pond supposes it's some sort of billy goat butt, that "but there are markets", but the reptiles preferred to stay with their old routines, offering a snap of Kamala Harris.

By golly, a chastened Lynch mob began to have a few saucy doubts and fears ...

Remember Liz Truss? Her 45 days as UK prime minister were a blur of economic activism that meant to begin a fundamental reshaping of British society. Global investors, big banks, the markets – they called a halt. Trump is running a bigger economy, of course. The US dollar is the global currency of choice. He has an electorate mandate; Truss did not. He will be around for some time yet.
But he is generating opponents at a furious lick. He is losing the confidence of allies, such as Canada and Australia, and augmenting the ambitions of competitors, such as Russia and China. Many of us are seeing our super funds fall. Appearances of Trump’s impregnability could prove illusory.
Finally, American history tells us that most second terms go wrong. LBJ had Vietnam. Nixon had Watergate. Reagan had Iran-Contra. Clinton had Monica. George W. Bush had a global recession. Barack Obama sowed the seeds of Trump 1.0. No student of history, Trump does at least know he must act fast. There are systemic forces – global and historical – looking to rein him in.

Sorry, the pond got that wrong. 

There were no saucy doubts and fears, and the billy goat didn't have a butt so much as a gigantic deep state conspiracy theory, involving global and historical systemic forces. 

Why, it could have been written by a member of the MAGA cult or a proponent of QAnon theories... so credit where credit is due, once again our hero academic has soiled the reputation of his home with a splendid piece of pigeon poo, Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

And so to Lloydie of the Amazon, last and sadly least. 

The pond rarely hears from him these days - he seems to have lost his mojo - and this two minute outing - so the reptiles timed it - was a tragic reminder of how climate science denialism has slipped at the lizard Oz since the glory days of Dame Slap and "Lord" Monckton ...

Chris Bowen’s energy plan is the definition of insanity, There is a lot to unpack in the energy minister’s excuses to hide the fact that power price decreases ­promised by the Albanese government in opposition are a thing of the past.

Naturally the reptiles began with a snap of Satan's minion, Energy Minister Chris Bowen.

Lloydie attempted to revive the reptile devotion to dinkum clean, virginal Oz coal, done down by damned renewables ...

The twisted logic of Chris Bowen’s renewable energy obsession is back on full display.
Power prices are going up another 9 per cent. The Energy Minister has blamed increased breakdowns at coal fired generators for the price rise.
“Not a day in the last two years have we had a coal-fired power station not break down somewhere in Australia,” Bowen said on Thursday.
“Not talking about planned maintenance, I’m talking about unexpected breakdowns which then see energy prices spike.
The Albanese government’s ­intention was to replace that power with “more reliable, ­cleaner, cheaper renewable energy”, he added.
There is a lot to unpack in Bowen’s excuses to hide the fact that power price decreases ­promised by the Albanese government in opposition are a thing of the past.
Firstly, coal-fired generation plants have been rendered unreliable and uneconomic because of government policy that favours highly subsidised renewable energy plants that cannot deliver power on demand.
The price paid to high-cost ­options to meet the peak demand, including batteries, is paid to all bidders in the market, lifting prices no matter how cheap renewable energy production might be.

At this point the reptiles slipped in an AV distraction, Sky News Sydney Reporter Crystal Wu has revealed some New South Wales residents believe the hike in energy costs for households is just "putting a Band-Aid on a bigger issue". The nine per cent price hike on energy bills for all residents will apply in NSW from July 1. The Albanese government has not ruled out addressing this in the short term by potentially offering residents a one-off payment similar to the 2024 relief payment of up to $300.

A calculator? Damn that's a boring snap, but if we're doing some calculations, some "putting a Band-Aid on a bigger issue", what about that bigger issue?

Per The Conversation, In the wake of Alfred, how do we think about and measure the cost of catastrophes?

In the wake of Alfred, how do we think about and measure the cost of catastrophes?
The governance arrangements surrounding disasters in Australia – national plans for how to prepare, respond and recover – are rapidly evolving. This has been largely driven by the disasters themselves.
Disasters in Australia have historically been bad, but infrequent. Now they are occurring on an almost annual basis.
Some locations are more exposed than others, including northeast NSW and southeast Queensland. The economic cost of the 2010-11 Queensland floods was estimated to be equivalent to 5.2% of the state’s gross domestic product (GDP) in that year.
Losses will continue to mount as such events become more frequent and severe.
That means we need to look at the full economic picture of the catastrophe life cycle. For climate events, this means looking not only at what we spend on insurance, preparation, prevention and recovery, but also the money invested in fossil fuels and subsidies.
The Climate Council has projected that parts of Australia might become uninsurable by 2030. A recent report by Climate Valuation looks at high-end flood risk down to suburb and address level.
Such projections are almost certainly underestimated because the models that are used do not adequately predict how fast extreme events are changing. (Nature, paywall)
People need relief now, but we cannot continue to finance our own destruction over the longer term.

Steady on, professorial research fellow Roger Jones, you've entirely failed to reckon with Lloydie of the Amazon and the reptiles of Oz's desire to continue to finance our destruction ...

Bowen’s solution is that we must build more renewable energy plants. For doubters, it is a case of Albert Einstein’s observation that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and ­expecting different results.
The fact is that, despite the billions of dollars spent on renewable energy projects to date, fossil-fuel generation still supplies the majority share of electricity demand.
Ironically, a glut of solar generation at the middle of the day is of growing concern to energy market regulators because prices are too low for those in the market to make a profit. At these times, coal and gas are shut out of the system and solar producers cannibalise themselves in a saturated market in a way that is not sustainable.
Bowen’s claims that unreliable coal generation is the problem does not hold up to scrutiny. Announcing the default market offer draft determination on Thursday The Australian Energy Regulator said wholesale market and network costs, the two largest components of DMO prices, had led to increases of 2 per cent to 12 per cent for the majority of customers.
“Average wholesale market spot prices increased across 2024, impacted by factors such as high demand, coal generator and network outages, and low solar and wind output that drove high price events across DMO regions,” the regulator said.
“These high price events have also affected the price of wholesale electricity contracts for 2025-26”.
This means the reality of high price events due to low solar and wind output have been factored into contract prices, ensuring a structural increase in prices.
Building more renewables and spending billions of dollars on transmission lines that receive a guaranteed return on investment is not the smart solution.

Same old, same old, and at the very end Lloydie dropped off the twig in his usual way. The pond tapped fingers, waiting for an answer, but none came ...

So what is the smart solution? Nuking the country to save the planet? Reverting to sweet virginal Oz coal and forgetting about all that climate science nonsense? Or just bashing out the usual half-arsed claptrap about renewables before rushing off to save the Amazon?

Alas, at that point all that was the sound of crickets, or perhaps a hoarse ironic laugh at Lloydie attributing a saying to Einstein, without even a fig leaf suggesting that it might be a common misattribution. 

How else could the pond end? 

“The definition of insanity is believing any quote you find on the internet which is attributed to Albert Einstein.” (here)

Such a relentlessly stupid man, and these days served in such small portions ... and so to wrap up proceedings with a fitting immortal Rowe ...