The pond's Sunday meditation this day features prattling Polonius, Dave, and Dame Slap, as good a tryptic time waster as can be found in the land ...

Note to the Ughmann: read more widely, The major cities that are becoming too hot for humans to live in, Large areas of Earth’s surface could soon be so hot that people will die within hours in the open air, several recent studies have warned.

Note for fun: Marco Rubio Melts Down at Musk in Furious Cabinet Shouting Match, A silent Trump watched on as the blow-up dragged on for an uncomfortably long time, according to a report. (archive link)

The NY Times source for the yarn, report, Inside the Explosive Meeting Where Trump Officials Clashed With Elon Musk, Simmering anger at the billionaire’s unchecked power spilled out in a remarkable Cabinet Room meeting. The president quickly moved to rein in Mr. Musk. (archive link)

Note for slapstick: Canada goose fights off bald eagle in rare, symbolism-laden battle on ice, Photographer captures 20-minute clash between birds emblematic of Canada and US amid high trade tensions.

Note to be left on Swasticars, just for fun:

On with Sunday business. 

Once upon a time the pond began its Sunday meditations with the Pellists or the angry Sydney Anglicans, but those days are long gone.

Still the pond - deeply conservative - reveres tradition, and believes that offering up prattling Polonius is as good as any Pellist for a Sunday meditation, especially when he turns Valiant Warrior and spends only four minutes of readers' time doing it.

Polish PM’s inconvenient truth: Europe is more powerful than Russia, I have never been a Trump conservative, but I can see his point that allies should do more with respect to their own security. Why do we have such a lack of belief in our own strength?

Ah, the disavowal "I have never been a Trump conservative", followed by the old two siderist "I can see his point." 

A classic routine.

Strangely the reptiles offered Polonius only one snap and no audio visual distractions, something of a humiliation, especially given the exotic nature of the offering:

“The paradox is that 500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians,” says Poland's Prime Minister, Donald Tusk. Picture: Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP

It surely is a paradox. The pond had thought that 330 million Americans and c. 459 million Europeans had been asking 38.6 million Ukrainians to defend them against Vlad the sociopathic Impaler. Throwing a little weaponry at a sociopathic warmonger isn't quite the same as dying on the ground, especially if Captain Bonespurs is your fearless leader.

Never mind, without benefit of snaps, Polonius rambled on, so the pond decided the odd interruption might help.

Just when it seemed that President Donald J. Trump had embraced the “give peace a chance” paean of the 1960s left, the Prime Minister of Poland spoke an inconvenient truth.
Last weekend, Donald Tusk said this: “The paradox is that 500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians.” He made the comment after a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies revealed that Europe, along with Ukraine, had twice as many fighter jets as Russia and more than double the number of soldiers, along with an overwhelming majority of artillery weapons.
Sure, Russia is a nuclear power. But so are Britain and France.

So Polonius sees deploying nukes and having a nuclear armageddon as a strategically wise thing to do?

That sounds a bit like Russian state TV, routinely ready to fire off the nukes, but do go on ...

Moreover, the lesson so far of the three-year-long Russia-Ukraine war is that Russia’s air force and navy have performed poorly and President Vladimir Putin has seen fit to get troops from the communist dictatorship of North Korea to support Russia against Ukraine’s forces in the field of battle. As Tusk put it: “The issue is not numbers but a lack of belief in our own strength.”
Trump went to the November 2024 election expressing the view that the US allies should do more with respect to their own security. He has not changed his position since entering the White House for the second time, in January.
I have never been a Trump conservative. But I have always understood that he has widescale support in the US. Apart from retaining a significant number of traditional Republicans, Trump appeals to lower income and less formally educated Americans who feel they are neglected by many leaders in politics and the public sector. And his social conservatism has significant support.
Also, there has always been a nationalist/isolationist movement in the US that does not want to be involved in the world at large.

So Polonius wants to fellow travel with the deplorables, and love the poorly educated? It must have got too much, the both siderism, so he followed up with a billy goat butt, dressed as an "however":

However, I believe it was most unwise for the US President to call Volodymyr Zelensky, the democratically elected leader of Ukraine, a dictator.
During his recent visit to the White House, Zelensky made some errors. It would have made sense for him to accept publicly the Trump administration’s proposed deal allowing the US access to Ukraine’s mineral deposits.
This was the best form of security guarantee that Ukraine could expect in view of the administration’s opposition to what are called “forever wars”.
Zelensky has said the meeting was regrettable since “it did not go the way it was supposed to”. However, it is fair to comment that Vice-President JD Vance, in particular, and to a lesser extent the President himself, were unnecessarily confrontational at what was, in effect, a media conference.

Ah, that reminded the pond of the Hydeing delivered on the topic of JD ...There are 1,000 grotesque memes of JD Vance – and they’re all more likable than the real thing

You may well be aware that Backpfeifengesicht is the German word for a face that is worthy of being slapped. Even so, how has this not been internationalised? Or at the very least Americanised, where its dictionary definition would presumably be adorned by a picture of the face of US vice-president JD Vance – already faultlessly playing the role of worst American at your hotel. You can immediately picture him at breakfast, can’t you? Every single other guest on the terrace with their shoulders up round their ears, just thinking: “Where is he now? How unbearable is he being NOW?” Next, imagine breakfast lasting four years.

I say the Backpfeifengesicht definition would be accompanied by JD Vance’s face … but then again, what is the face of JD Vance? The internet is awash with people suffering an acute case of not being able to remember it any more, having seen so many hideous comic distortions of Vance that those meme versions are not simply the only results on the first page of your own mental Google search, but stretch deep beyond the second and into the third. Somewhere on page four, where you might as well publish the nuclear codes or pictures of Taylor Swift giving cocaine to babies, is an unmodified snap of what JD Vance actually looks like. Or at least what he looks like with eyeliner.

Before you get there – and you don’t, really – your synaptic filing systems throw up every variety of Photoshopped Vancefake: swollen manboy, face wearing a Minion suit, a bearded egg … I’m hoping that sooner or later, an American news outlet will accidentally use a modified photo, because even the picture editor has forgotten what the vice-president looks like, and then we can have one of those massively self-regarding legacy media-blow-ups, where the entire staff has to resign after a remorseless investigation by the executive editor reveals Vance isn’t actually a big purple grape. “This is a stain on our newspaper’s history. A big purple stain.”...

And so on, but back to Polonius ...

Also, it should be remembered that Zelensky’s first languages are Russian and Ukrainian, not English. When Trump is attempting to play “the art of the deal” on the world stage, it’s very difficult to guess what the result may be.
However, already some damage has been done to Western democracies.
Trump’s decision to pause both military supplies and intelligence sharing to Ukraine in the middle of a war that Putin’s Russia started is a reminder that the US is not always a reliable security partner.

At this point, Polonius decided to do a Henry and wander back to times past. Cut him some slack, how else could he get Wilson, Roosevelt and Churchill into the mix?

Sure, the US, during the presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson, in April 1917 joined World War I. But US forces made little impact on the field of battle in the defeat of Imperial Germany.
Democrat president Franklin D. Roosevelt went to the November 1940 presidential election with a promise that “American boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars”. In the event, the US entered World War II after its navy was bombed by Imperial Japan at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Nazi Germany declared war on the US four days later.
If Winston Churchill’s Britain – with the support of the Commonwealth nations – had not prevailed in the Battle of Britain in mid-1940, Adolf Hitler would have been victorious in Europe while the US was a neutral power.
It’s true that, so far at least, the US has left its armed forces in place in Japan (since the end of World War II in August 1945) and South Korea (since the start of the Korean war ceasefire in July 1953) to protect both nations from China and the Soviet Union (now Russia).
However, it’s the 50th anniversary in April this year of when the US made an undignified exit from Saigon, the capital of former non-communist South Vietnam. South Vietnam fell to communist North Vietnam whose military weapons were supplied by the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, China.
Hanoi prevailed after US ground forces finally left South Vietnam in March 1973. Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, after the US congress refused to continue to give the Saigon administration military weapons.

What a terrible thing to suggest. 

Surely we can place great faith in the USA ... just look at The Bulwark's We Live in the Dumbest Times...

In an increasingly hostile world of great power competition, it’s nice to know that in Pete Hegseth we finally have a secretary of defense focused on the important things: purging military web databases of thousands of images featuring women, minorities, and anything else that smacks, to the right-wing palate, of DEI.

The crowning achievement, per the AP: “In some cases, photos seemed to be flagged for removal simply because their file included the word ‘gay,’ including service members with that last name and an image of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.” Happy Friday.

Not to forget all the photos scrubbed, purged, by the free speechers. (Cf. Karen Hao's ‘Terrified’ Federal Workers Are Clamming Up, Sources within the government reveal the true extent of the Trump administration’s crackdown on speech. (archive link)

Happy Sunday.

Encouraging stuff, but we should remember that in his day Polonius was a big 'Nam hawk, and kept on scribbling furiously about how the Yanks coulda, woulda, shoulda won the war ...

Here he is back in August 2016 still fighting the good fight, smiting and smoting his enemies and mixing it up with being a paranoid tyke..

...As Peter Edwards documents in his official history Crises and Commitments (Allen & Unwin, 1992), the decision to send Australian combat forces to South Vietnam was made by Menzies and deputy prime minister Jack McEwen. Neither was a Catholic.

In 1965, the key opponent of Australia’s Vietnam commitment was Labor Party leader Arthur Calwell. Calwell was a practising Catholic. In Australia and the Vietnam War (NewSouth, 2014), Edwards names commentators Denis Warner, Peter Samuel, Geoffrey Fairbairn and Owen Harries as making the best case for Australia’s support of South Vietnam. None of them was a Catholic. Contrary to Bowden’s assertion, few, if any, supporters of Australia’s Vietnam commitment regarded it as a “holy crusade” — whatever that might mean.

The ABC leftist mindset was evident again earlier this month when ABC News tweeted: “We want to hear your Vietnam War protest stories.” But not, apparently, the stories of those who supported Australia’s commitment.

On News Breakfast on Thursday, Rebecca Armitage interviewed Rowan Cahill, a one-time member of the protest movement. No alternative civilian view was heard. This focus on the Vietnam protest movement overlooks the fact most Australians supported the commitment. The Coalition won elections in 1963, 1966 and 1969. The anti-communist Democratic Labor Party did very well in the 1970 half-Senate election, winning three Senate seats.

Certainly the Vietnam war was lost by the Saigon government. However, the 521 Australians who fell in the conflict did not die in vain. As Edwards acknowledges, the US-led Vietnam commitment delayed a communist victory by 10 years — much to the benefit of nations such as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. This was also to Australia’s advantage.

Long-time Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015) once pointed out that Southeast Asia was better able to withstand a communist victory in Vietnam in 1975 than it would have been a decade earlier when the non-communist nations of Southeast Asia were not so well established. That’s not a myth.

Yes, everything for the best in the best of Polonial worlds ... they're waking up, even if that makes them dangerously woke ...

The lesson is that the US may – or may not – be a reliable ally. It would seem that after being complacent about national security for many decades, most European nations are awakening to the realisation that they cannot rely on the US for security.

This should have been evident as recently as the first Trump administration’s decision to negotiate with the Taliban for its return to power in Afghanistan and the Biden administration’s chaotic exit from that nation.
During the remaining almost four years of the Trump administration and beyond – whether the Republicans or Democrats are in office – it makes sense for Australia to assume that it may have to rely on itself so far as security is concerned.
This is despite the fact the US and Australia have mutual interests concerning the sharing of intelligence facilities and access to Australia’s ports, airfields and military training opportunities.
Through the years, this argument has been put forcefully by two civilians: BA Santamaria, who published The Defence of Australia in 1970; and Hugh White, who wrote How to Defend Australia in 2019. The difference between the two is that Santamaria was a supporter of the Australia-US Alliance while White says Australia should look elsewhere for its security.
What the two have in common is consistent with the view of Poland’s Prime Minister that nations should be prepared to ensure their own security.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Rely on ourselves, using American planes and American subs that can be rendered useless at the stroke of a computer key? Put the pond in a pram ... the level of delusion is strong in this one ...

Meanwhile, on another planet, Anne Applebaum scribbled for The Atlantic, The Rise of the Brutal American, This is how the bad guys act.

This part of her preview for the piece, sent out by email:

I’ve been in several different European cities over the past few days - Warsaw, Vilnius, Berlin - and talked to many different kinds of people, from book publishers to politicians. Everyone I met, whatever their background, wanted to talk about Trump, Vance, and their performance in the Oval Office last week. In the Atlantic, I wrote about the immense shock felt in Europe, not just because of what that scene said about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it said about Americans:
"In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.
Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterward, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win”…
These are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are Mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling."

Europeans also find it troubling that so many Americans now live in Trump’s alternate reality, one that is profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda:

"Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many cease-fires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.
But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X."

But Europeans have to live in the real reality, one in which the Russian President has said nothing publicly about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. Russian planes continue to bomb Ukrainian cities, Russian spies commit frequent acts of sabotage across Europe. Russian hackers attack European infrastructure every single day. No wonder nearly three-quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.
This is a sea change, and the consequences will be with us for many, many years. A break in the American-European relationship will have an unfathomable impact on culture, science, commerce and trade as well as security. I’ve already heard from people who no longer want their children to study in the U.S., who have cancelled vacations in the U.S. Not only will Europeans rethink their defense, which is already happening, but their attitudes to American technology and products, maybe even to American culture and movies.

And this was her wrap-up:

...what was ominous in 2016 is dangerous in 2025, especially in Europe. Russian military aggression is more damaging, Russian sabotage across Europe more frequent, and Russian cyberattacks almost constant. In truth, it is Putin, not Zelensky, who started this conflict, Putin who has brought North Korean troops and Iranian drones to Europe, Putin who instructs his propagandists to talk about nuking London, Putin who keeps raising the stakes and scope of the war. Most Europeans live in this reality, not in the fictional world inhabited by Trump, and the contrast is making them think differently about Americans. According to pollsters, nearly three-quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.
In reality, the Russians have said nothing publicly about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the past decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but that millions of people can see. Their use of tariffs as random punishment, not for enemies but for allies, seems not just brutal but inexplicable.
And in the Oval Office, Trump and Vance behaved like imperial rulers chastising a subjugated colony, vocalizing the same disgust and disdain that Russian propagandists use when they talk about Ukraine. Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next.

Come on Polonius, try a little more reading. Or perhaps stick to the 'toons ...

The pond can't recall David Kilcullen ever making it into the pond, but as Dave is covering some of the same turf as Polonius, it seemed like an interesting bonus ... even though the reptiles clocked it at an extravagant 10 minute read ...

Trump’s gift to the world: a wake-up call to geopolitical reality, Donald Trump’s brash, mercurial demeanour – unpleasant though it may be – is a blessing in disguise. His abrasiveness scrubs away the veneer of fine words that often obscures the nature of America’s relationship with allies.

Just to remind the hive mind, in case it slipped their noggins, the reptiles offered up US President Donald Trump speaks after signing executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC. Picture: AFP

Dave opined that these were not normal times. Really?

When you don't need an answer there'll be days like this

When you don't meet a chancer there'll be days like this

When all the parts of the puzzle start to look like they fit it

Then I must remember there'll be days like this

Carry on Dave, remember there'll be many more days like this before it's over.

About a fortnight ago a Chinese naval task group led by a Renhai-class guided missile cruiser, one of the most powerful surface combatants in Beijing’s fleet, passed well within cruise-missile range of the Royal Australian Navy’s Fleet Base East in Sydney, then conducted an unannounced live-fire drill in the Tasman Sea, disrupting commercial airline traffic, before turning west into the Great Australian Bight.
Australian aircraft and warships shadowed the task group and Foreign Minister Penny Wong challenged her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, at the Johannesburg G20 summit that both were attending. Questions were raised at Senate estimates and a political debate broke out. In normal times, this incident would have dominated national-security news for days. These are not normal times.
The task group’s transit overlapped with a visit to Australia by US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo – but neither the White House nor the Pentagon issued a statement on the Chinese warships. Instead, anyone watching the American media last week would have seen US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance publicly berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as a US-Ukrainian minerals deal fell over amid sharp recriminations.

Dave's next snap was a double header, President Donald Trump meets with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office at the White House. Picture: AP

A pity there was no reminder of the homework that followed ...

Dave didn't sound particularly phased:

After his shouting match with Trump, Zelensky flew to London for crisis talks with European leaders. That same weekend, Russian forces captured two more villages in Ukraine’s east and a Russian missile strike killed up to 150 Ukrainian troops and 30 foreign instructors near the town of Dnipro. The next day Washington suspended all military assistance to Ukraine with immediate effect and two days later cut all intelligence support, damaging Ukraine’s air defences and hampering its ability to launch long-range missile strikes.
Vance mocked an Anglo-French peacekeeping force proposed during Europe’s talks with Zelensky, on the basis that a US minerals deal would have been “a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”. French forces fought in Afghanistan, of course, and British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq; both committed forces for the campaign against Islamic State, and all NATO nations contributed to at least one of these wars.

Another reminder followed - the hive mind is sometimes slow on the uptake on who is being discussed, US President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky during their Oval Office spat. Picture: AFP

Then came a gigantic billy goat butt:

Given all this, it may surprise some readers to hear that I consider Trump to be a valuable gift.
Trump is a gift because his brash, mercurial demeanour – unpleasant though it may be – is a blessing in disguise. His abrasiveness scrubs away the veneer of fine words that often obscures the nature of America’s relationship with allies.
For Americans, phrases such as “the free world”, the “rules-based international order” or the “shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific” help soften the transactional reality of US global primacy, which – while also benefiting others, including Australia – was set up by Washington primarily in America’s own interests.
For Australians, this reality is sometimes shrouded by sentimentality about ANZUS or AUKUS, a supposed alliance of democracies, the memory of America “saving” Australia from Japanese invasion during World War II, or the belief that a common language and shared cultures somehow outweigh national interests. They do not.

Oh yes, what a valuable gift:

Dave also did a Henry and plunged into the past:

Lord Palmerston, Britain’s foreign secretary in 1848, famously argued that “we have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”.

At this point the reptiles became desperate and began to dig into the cheap archive, with Lord Palmerston, Britain’s foreign secretary in 1848.

After that, Dave went the full Curtin:

Seventy years later, US president Woodrow Wilson told a British audience “not (to) speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither … There are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and of interests.”
Australian governments, whatever their declared policies, have always understood this, recognising that our prosperity and safety depend on a stable, peaceful global environment that historically we have been too small to secure on our own. Australian strategists must therefore reckon with the real-world mismatch between our vast territory, our globally connected, trade-dependent economy and our small population.
As the planet’s sixth-largest country by area, Australia has the world’s 12th-largest economy by nominal GDP but only its 54th largest population. We are separated by sea from trading partners, and our national survival depends on lengthy maritime supply chains. In consequence, we have followed what I once called the “forward school of Australian statecraft”, in which we partner with whatever great power, or group of powers, comes closest to sharing our values while also being able to secure the global environment.
By contributing to a stable, secure, connected international system underwritten by a friendly power, we advance our own interests.
For 40 years, from 1901 to 1941, that friendly power was the British Empire. Australia’s strategy was to support the empire economically and militarily, participating in free trade within (but not outside) the empire and contributing to expeditionary operations – from Sudan to South Africa, Gallipoli to the Somme – in return for the security and prosperity only a friendly, world-spanning empire could provide.
To be sure, the imperial defence relationship was more than merely transactional: there were (and are) strong ties of blood and affection between Britain and Australia – and, of course, we share a head of state.
But in 1941, when the empire proved unable to deliver, Australia immediately and unceremoniously pivoted to the US. As prime minister John Curtin wrote three weeks after Pearl Harbor, “without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom”. Since then, and especially since the signing of the ANZUS Treaty in September 1951, Australia has looked to the US as our principal partner.

To add to the Curtin effect, the reptiles came up with another cheap archive snap, Prime Minister John Curtin, who led the country for most of the Second World War, and was Labor Party leader from 1934-1945, clenches his fist while giving a speech.

Dave suggested we should be feeling our oats:

Bipartisan support for the alliance, real friendliness between our two peoples and the democratic ideals that both governments profess should not blind us to the underlying hard-power reality of Australia’s relationship with the US. We partner with Washington not for sentimental reasons but because we need an ally powerful enough to stabilise the global system, yet friendly enough to do so without harming our interests or limiting our local freedom of action.
Academic and former Australian Army intelligence analyst Clinton Fern­andes has called Australia a “sub-imperial power”. One may quibble with his choice of words but this is precisely the point: underlying realities, not surface sentiments, are what matter in geopolitics.
Even with America’s recent run of internal instability, external defeats and failures of deterrence, no other global power currently is strong enough and friendly enough to fit the bill. If one were to emerge and the US ceased to hold up its end of the bargain, one may imagine a future Curtin – equally without pangs or inhibitions – throwing in our lot with that other power.
No such power exists. But what if Washington were simultaneously declining in relative military strength, lacking in national will to secure the global system, moving out of alignment with our values, damaging our trade, bullying partners and becoming unreliable as an ally? What if, at the same time, no other power were strong or friendly enough to take America’s place? In that case, 124 years after Federation, we would have to stand on our own feet and, finally and fully, grasp our independence. That would be hard and very costly, but it might still be the right thing to do, to serve our interests over the long term.
We would have no choice but to spend significantly more on defence and, importantly, to stop thinking of national security as a specialist skill practised by a small cadre of professionals on behalf of the rest of society. We would have to be “all in” as a nation, putting mobilisation, resilience and self-reliance – in defence, yes, but also in energy, industry, technology, education, health and agriculture – at the heart of all aspects of policy. We would need to focus on national cohesion, political will and shared culture. We would have to treat neighbours as more important than distant allies, however friendly.

Ah yes, and we'd do it with AUKUS subs and US sourced planes. Is there no end to our ingenuity and strength ... unless Dave happens to think that we need to turn into preppers armed with .303s, ready to give Xi what for ... 

In such a hypothetical scenario, where our traditional nuclear-armed ally was no longer reliable, Australia might need its own sovereign nuclear deterrent, or at least an extremely capable array of long-range non-nuclear strike assets. We would certainly need powerful theatre-level missile defences to compensate for loss of US extended deterrence. We would need a much larger and more powerful navy, and an army and air force capable of projecting substantial forces at scale, over long duration and alone, if necessary, across our region. All of this would cost more for our economy, and demand more of our people, than a policy of outsourcing security to distant allies. It would be costly and controversial – and pursuing it would demand considerable political will and leadership skill.
Paradoxically, Australia’s increased capacity and self-reliance in this scenario would make us much more valuable as an ally. We could contribute more – and could expect greater consideration of our national interests – in any alliance effort we chose to join. Rather than being taken for granted, Australia’s voice would carry more weight in any council of war, as well as in peacetime deliberations. Australia would be, in short, an adult among adults, a regional great power in our own right.

Phew, that's a relief, we'd just have more missiles purchased from the US and aimed using US satellites, and we'd be terribly self-reliant, thanks to those AUKUS subs and US sourced planes, and US software to go with the hardware.

Dave was thinking head. No need to talk about alliances, we were on our own:

Some may argue the ANZUS alliance already gives us a security guarantee, offering such strong assurances of US assistance in the event of conflict that we would be foolhardy to abandon it. I agree wholeheartedly with the last part – it would be the height of folly to recklessly walk away from the alliance. I concur with Wong and opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie, among many others, that ANZUS is a central pillar of Australia’s national security. But for anyone who thinks ANZUS gives us a guarantee of security, I have bad news: the alliance offers no such thing.

Articles II and III of the treaty commit the signatories to “maintain and develop their individual capacity to resist armed attack” and “consult together, whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific”. Article IV, the closest ANZUS comes to a security guarantee, merely notes that each party recognises that “an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes”.

Contrast this with article five of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s founding document, signed in 1949, two years before ANZUS. Article five makes no mention of “constitutional processes”. The signatories simply state that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and … if such an armed attack occurs, each of them (will) assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

ANZUS is far less direct, and much less of a commitment: American “constitutional processes” do not commit the US government to respond in kind to an armed attack on Australia: far from it. Rather, to paraphrase Wilson in 1918, there are only two things that might do so: community of ideals and of interests. All of this is obvious, of course, to anyone who thinks about this stuff for a living – it’s just that not many people do.

To the extent that ANZUS encourages us to outsource thinking on national security, trusting that somebody else has us covered, it can harm us by encouraging passive complacency. In this sense, over-dependence on the alliance could be considered a contemporary version of the Singapore strategy, the between-the-wars policy that allowed successive Australian governments to economise on defence spending as “successive British governments assured their Australian counterparts that, in the event of Japanese southward expansion, a battle fleet could be in Singapore within six weeks”.

In the event, as every schoolchild knows, no fleet materialised: Singapore fell and Australia found itself fighting for its life, largely alone, for the next year. Could we hold out against similar odds, without our major ally, for a similar time today? To take one example, could we secure the global petroleum imports without which Australia runs out of fuel in seven to eight weeks? A Chinese flotilla in the Tasman Sea, alarming Australians but largely ignored in Washington, underlines the urgency of that question.

So much for AUKUS. Perhaps Dave read that piece by Ben Doherty in The Graudian, Surface tension: could the promised Aukus nuclear submarines simply never be handed over to Australia?

What about Henry Sokolski proposing It's time to ditch Virginia subs for AUKUS and go to plan B? Inter alia:

...Rather than spend more than $13 billion on US Virginia-class submarines, under Plan B, Australia would maintain its current fleet of aging Collins-class subs while investing in, and eventually fielding, other advanced defense technologies through Pillar Two.
These innovative projects, which include uncrewed systems, AI, quantum computer science, and hypersonic weapons, could deliver technologies that provide most of what the Virginia-class subs would offer for Australia. For example, Chinese fighters can barely reach Australia and Beijing’s bombers cannot risk unescorted missions. Without an air threat, Australian surface warships, uncrewed vessels, and long-endurance drones like the MQ-9 Reaper could patrol the waters around Australia for Chinese subs and ships (which operated last week off Australia’s eastern waters) at a fraction of the price of Virginia-class boats.
Autonomous undersea vehicles like the Ghost Shark or Speartooth could perform some of the offensive missions nuclear submarines would otherwise provide by deploying mines or torpedoes — or weaponizing the vehicle itself. The threat of an unwarned attack on Chinese artificial islands or naval forces in the South China Sea could deter Beijing from armed aggression, especially if China is also confronting US and Japanese forces to the north.

Sheesh, momma said there'd be days like this ...

The reptiles cranked things up a notch with an audio visual distraction, A recent incident involving Chinese live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea has highlighted a concerning "failure" in communication between the Australian Defence Force and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. During a Senate Estimates hearing on Wednesday, Admiral David Johnston, the chief of Australia's Defence Force, revealed that the ADF received its initial notification about China's military drill in the Tasman Sea last Friday via AirServices Australia.

The pond still isn't sure what the response should have been? Bung on a do, and teach the invading Chinese a lesson? 

Not likely, the navy had more important things to do, like rescue solo sailors heading into a cyclone ... carry on Dave ...do some vigorous sanewashing and sanesplaining ...

In the wake of last week’s events, Europeans are experiencing an overdue wake-up call as Trump not only continues demanding that NATO nations spend more on defence but also imposes tariffs on allies, while Vance mocks Europe’s military prowess and both Trump and Vance publicly scold Zelensky while cutting aid and intelligence support to Ukraine.
Former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen has acknowledged this, writing in The Wall Street Journal on February 11: “The world needs a policeman – and since World War II the US has filled that role. But what if the policeman no longer exercises his authority over geopolitical gangsters – or becomes abusive toward the world’s most steadfast rule followers?” Rasmussen is not wrong, but it is a little odd to see European leaders now acting so surprised over a policy shift President Trump has been telegraphing for years.
More broadly, Trump is different in style but not necessarily in substance from previous US presidents. In his call for NATO to spend more on defence, he is using harsher language to make substantively the same request as his four predecessors. Presidents or policy advisers from both parties periodically make similar statements about Australia, though often conflating (as our own politicians also do) greater expenditure on weapon platforms with improved national defence capacity.
Australians should not make the mistake of focusing on Trump’s personality, thinking that Trump himself is the problem and that once he leaves the world stage things will somehow revert to normal. Rather, he represents the new normal for a global security environment that – as his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, noted in January – is increasingly multipolar and defined by great-power spheres of influence.
According to Rubio, “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was ... a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.
“We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.”

Ah Liddle Marco ... he's certainly in the wars ...

Dave seemed to enjoy cold doses of reality, perhaps better coming from King Donald than Chairman Xi:

One might think that, if the new administration really regards the world as multipolar, it would perhaps be less dismissive of regional allies. Doing more in our own defence, agreeing when our interests align while being prepared to disagree when our values diverge, might paradoxically build respect in the relationship.
In an increasingly dangerous, multipolar and unstable global environment, Trump is a cold dose of reality. He offers us a valuable gift: a wake-up call, if we are willing to listen to it.

Reality is listening to a chaotic sociopath making a mess in the kitchen? Really? He still thinks we can get on side with the Cantaloupe Caligula?

We can get out of trouble by appeasing the wrathful gods?

Really? You first into the cave Dave ...

Finally to Dame Slap, and the pond wondered if it should bother, what with all the guff already to hand, but Dame Slap routinely likes to act as the bitch from hell, and looking at bitches from hell on a Sunday can be soothing ...

Why I’m celebrating the gender pay gap, This obsession among elite women misses the point: many women don’t want to work like men do.

Sure the reptiles clock it at a seven minute read, but you could wait until the went to the toilet and took out the tablet or the phone to have a go ...

Start with a snap, Portraying the gender pay gap as a terrible thing for women doesn’t begin to capture the truth about women and work. Picture: Getty

The pond is proud, as pleased as punch, to announce that after scribbling this, Dame Slap has agreed to take a substantial pay cut at the lizard Oz, to match the rate paid to cleaners, and that a month after that she will be resigning to play hausfrau ...

In anticipation of International Women’s Day, I did my small bit for gender wowserism. Sitting in a pub in North America, I confiscated one of the Trivial Pursuit cards from a little box sitting on our table next to the salt and pepper shakers. Here was the question under the “Life & Times” category: What group of 36 million people did a 1963 Northwestern University study find to be a menace on the highway?Answer: Women.

Sorry, that was a joke. She's not going to give up scoring a handsome stipend to totter around in slippers, not when she can play bitch from hell and demean other women and put them in their place or in their box, or trot out The Trivial Pursuit card Janet Albrechtsen collected.

WTF? What on earth does that mean?

Make that WTF² as she rabbits on and on about how good it is to work for less than men are paid ...

I shoved the dog-eared card in my jeans pocket because bogus research about women deserves to be binned. In the same vein, I am imploring Peter Dutton to do women and men a favour and axe the taxpayer-funded Workplace Gender Equality Agency. This bureaucracy’s gendered assertions about women are, frankly, as rude and crude and outdated as Northwestern University’s “research”.
WGEA’s agenda has nothing to do with real pay discrimination because it’s been illegal for 50 years to pay a woman less than what a man earns in the same job. WGEA’s “gender pay equality” campaign is a bogus agenda built on bogus numbers – comparing the average pay of all women in all jobs with the average wage of all men in all jobs.
Portraying this pay gap as a terrible thing for women doesn’t begin to capture the truth about women and work. The truth would kill their story and lots of cushy careers at WGEA.
There is something profoundly good about the gender pay gap. Behind the WGEA’s bogus numbers is the reality of women’s work and life choices. For as long as we have a gender pay gap, we know that millions of women are choosing not to drop everything for a career. That’s worth celebrating, not hiding from. As one of our readers wrote this week: “Most couples need two incomes these days and they make choices along the way on who should take a lead and who may go a bit slower while kids are young. This also changes as they move through the kids’ life stages. Rigid old school … dogma ignores this and assumes women drop everything for career (which is what the originators of this dogma did) – it is completely outdated”.
When the reality of women’s choices in the 21st century is not mentioned by WGEA on its annual day of gender pay gap shame, you know the organisation is infected with ideology.
And those who trot out WGEA “research”, with nary a mention of female choices, are letting the side down too.

Why do the reptiles always project? Why does the deeply ideological Dame Slap, once an IPA heavy, think others are infected but she is somehow immune?

Everything she scribbles is roughly equivalent to catching an ideological form of 1950s Covid ...

The gender pay gap has long been an obsession among elite women for the benefit of elite women, prompting an obvious question: is even part of their agenda to ensure already privileged educated middle-class women get paid as much as men but for less work, or get senior jobs that they wouldn’t otherwise secure on a merit system? These are confronting questions, but it’s high time we had more honesty.
The WGEA agenda goes beyond wowserism. It’s demeaning to millions of women and men who make many choices about the way they live and work. The gender activists and their supporters have concocted a shallow stereotype about women in order to complain about a gender pay gap. They assume we want to work like men.
I didn’t. Millions of other women don’t either. There is no shame in that. We put aside, slowed down, switched careers – and big pay packets – to raise our children. Motherhood is not the only driver, either. Many women just value work/life balance more than men. From the instant they receive their HSC or ATAR scores, and for the rest of their lives, many women appear to make very different choices to men.

As well as a bitch from hell, she really is an entitled princess, without the first clue what it's like to live in poverty and do back-breaking work.

The reptiles helped explain by offering this nauseating snap cheaply picked up out of a stock library, Millions of women put aside, slowed down, switched careers – and big pay packets – to raise our children. Picture: istock

No, it's not "our children", they raise "their children", and if they want to work while they're doing it, and get help in the doing, that's fine by the pond.

The pond realises that Dame Slap is just a troll, and that this troll is in the vein of a traditional housewife troll ... daddy at work, bub in crib, and mummy in apron slaving over the stove ...

Like any rabid ideologue, she's got an explanation for anything and everything, and it usually involves "activists", when all women want to do is roast that chook ...

This explains why, despite years of sustained haranguing and hectoring by gender activists, there is still a gender pay gap. Those damn women are still, in 2025, choosing to work differently. The gender activists say the enemy of gender pay equality is systemic discrimination and other structural biases. But what if the enemy of the pay parity is women – the millions of women who choose to work differently? When WGEA bureaucrats ignore this, they demean women.

If the gender pay gap disappears, that would be a sign of one of two things. Either women have freely decided, or been pressured by gender activists, to believe that they want to be in the same jobs, for the same hours, working at the same intensity as men. Or it will signal that women are being paid the same as men to do less work. Either outcome is rotten for at least one sex or the other, and probably both.
Naive idealists like to think a “cultural shift” will eliminate the gender pay gap. Like the female fund manager who said a while back that we could get rid of stark pay gaps between men and women in bonus-heavy industries such as investment banking, private equity and asset management if men were encouraged to prioritise a work-life balance so that men and women all worked similarly civilised hours.

Uh huh, like any dinkum troll, Dame Slap is ready to piss all over such nonsense. Sadly, she's just a Type B personality and ready to accept her place in life, as an entitled blonde bimbo given a free lunch by the Emeritus Chairman:

That sounds terrific. But there are reasons nice-sounding solutions are rarely real ones. These industries necessarily attract Type A personalities who thrive on adrenaline and long hours and would resent being told to work less hard so their less-driven colleagues don’t suffer at bonus time.
It also assumes, wrongly, that these workplaces can dictate their own pace of work. Working conditions in many industries are determined by their customers and by their competitors. An investment bank that tells its clients it will turn around work at its pace, not when the client needs it, or as quickly as its competitors, is headed for ­insolvency.
This is why all the sanctimonious bleating by investment banks and management consultants for decades now about gender equality in senior jobs has not made a jot of difference to the gender pay gap. Leading consultancies McKinsey, BCG and Bain all have female chief executives. Yet, none of them are gender pay gap role models. Using WGEA’s ham-fisted measurement, at McKinsey the average total remuneration pay gap is 44.3 per cent for financial year 2023-24. At Bain it’s 44 per cent; at BCG it’s 38.3 per cent.
Investment banks are worse. The gap at Morgan Stanley is 58.6 per cent, Goldman Sachs 50.2 per cent, and UBS 48.5 per cent. At Macquarie Bank, the gender pay gap is 41.8 per cent despite female chief executive Shemara Wikramanayake topping Australia’s highest-paid CEO list with a pay packet of $29.4m.

Why the fuss? Surely Dame Slap is secretly pleased? Surely she's happy to downgrade her payments and perks to the sort of level earned by the office assistants? Surely she's delighted women are down valued, downplayed ... after all her columns are usually trolling crap, so why shouldn't she be paid crap?

At that point the reptiles slipped in Macquarie Group CEO Shemara Wikramanayake. Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

It was only so Dame Slap, precious snowflake, could do a crybaby routine ...

This week, Wikramanayake said the relatively low number of female executives at Macquarie “should have been fixed a long time ago” and there is a “heck of a lot of work to do” on attracting women to finance.
But how? There are no barriers to entry in financial services. Girls are shooting ahead of boys at school; they can choose whatever course they want at university, and apply for jobs in the same way as men. But clearly, fewer women than men want to work in these kinds of jobs.
The best work Wikramanayake can do is continue being a brilliant role model for women who want that kind of life.
Logically, if fewer women than men want to work in senior finance jobs, logically that means that men and women with the same skill sets won’t be competing in the same numbers for certain jobs. If you then insist on a 50/50 gendered workplace, you’re saying we will promote women over better-­qualified men.
Some gender activists don’t realise this is the inevitable consequence of their crusade. But those who do intend this result should have the courage of their convictions, and come clean about trying to affix a deliberate and permanent structural bias in the workplace in favour of women. Or, at least in preferred sections of the workplace – you don’t hear many demands for gender equality in garbage ­collection.

Actually the pond is all for gender equality in garbage collection, and all for the recognition of garbage collectors. 

Hauling away crap is an incredibly useful thing to do for society, and women can do it just as well as men. Note to women, there's an incredible amount of garbage here, in urgent need of collection.

Only a princess troubled by the pea under her forty mattresses would toss her pretty blonde hair and winkle her pretty nose at all the dreadful smells...

Scribbling crap for the lizard Oz is not nearly as useful as a garbo... though the pond concedes that there might even be a case for gender inequality, at least for Dame Slap's pay to be cut in half by tomorrow at noon ...

It's an oldie, but it seems to have some passing relevance to Dame Slap's mindset ...

Oh dear, the lady has foolishly attempted to join the conversation with a wild and dangerous opinion of her own ... what half-baked drivel. See how the men look at her with utter contempt ...

WGEA and its supporters are unshackled from logic or honesty. But are we to be a society unshackled from the very virtues that drive genuine progress? Do we really want a system which demands equal pay for unequal work contributions? Come to think of it, if the price of eliminating gender pay gaps is a sedate and underperforming economy, do we really want that? Australia’s waning productivity is a huge issue. Former Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe identified this recently as the real cause of the nation’s cost-of-living crisis.
When WGEA thumps the table about the gender pay gap and gender equality, it’s worth remembering this taxpayer-funded outfit is a case of “do as I say, not as I do”. In 2024, WGEA paid an average salary of $111,746 to women and $106,141 to men. The agency head is female, the second in charge is female, at the next level, 10 of 12 employees are women, and one level further down, 15 of 21 staff are female. At the lowest level, there are three men to two women.
The WGEA boss says they are always trying to recruit more men – but what if men don’t want to do this work?
At WGEA, most of the 50 employees work from home. Twenty-two per cent work from home five days a week; 10 per cent four days a week; 38 per cent three days a week; 18 per cent two days a week; and 2 per cent one day a week. No wonder so many women work there.
Men and women are free to make different choices about work and life. Why don’t we celebrate that – on our way to demolishing the divisive and dodgy WGEA bureaucracy that refuses to do so.

Perhaps it's time to join Luckovich in deer training class...

Or perhaps it's time to cut loose with Uncle Leon ... no wonder Dame Slap is feeling past her prime.