In which the Lynch mob has a mango-flavoured meltdown and the Ughmann saves the world again ...

 

The pond was vastly entertained by assorted excerpts of an ABC interview showing the Cantaloupe Caligula was a faithful believer in alternative Photoshop 'tats on fingers' realities - no matter, never mind said Faux Noise - and the wondrous Kim Jon Il-style cabinet meeting, but, alas, no such entertainment was on view at the top of the digital edition of the lizard Oz ...

Instead, at the top of the page fear of unions was the feature - it's the first of May so reptiles gotta do what reptiles do to celebrate the day - while down towards the bottom, devious, insidious Chinese operatives were at work to undermine the Duttonator, while Noel returned to support the reptile cause in relation to tricky, uppity blacks ...

Surely they could have started with the Duttonator's hugely successful bowser strategy?

Over in the extreme far right section, petulant Peta was, at least in the early morning, top of the world ma, with an exercise in sullen resentfulness.

Oh feel the bitterness ...

PM’s campaign of deception a masterclass in mediocrity
If Anthony Albanese becomes the first prime minister to be returned since John Howard, 21 years back, it will be the triumph of low politics over high principle.
By Peta Credlin

Columnist

The rest of the pack wasn't up to much, and the pond discreetly passed over Jack the Insider's rich fantasy life ...

For at least a full full nanosecond the pond thought of harvesting petulant Peta's tears and indulging in a Bacchanalian romp with this florid cardboard chateau drop, but luckily the Lynch mob was to hand, and the pond always makes room for him, no matter the topic, and this day he was triggered into a mango-flavoured meltdown by the elbows up movement and by other painful thoughts buried deep in the hive mind ...

The header: Donald Trump has no interest in leading a global conservative movement, Canada’s election holds a vital lesson for leaders of the right: stop assuming you have an ideological soulmate in the White House.

The caption: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks on stage at his campaign headquarters after the Liberal Party won the Canadian election.

The mystical injunction: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there.

It was only a four minute read, or so the reptiles said, and where's the harm, because the Lynch mob began with a compelling question:

Is Donald Trump a conservative? If so, he’s not a fraternal one. In Canada, “the 51st state”, he actively made conservative defeat possible if not inevitable. “Unbelievably dumb,” wrote Greg Sheridan in these pages. Bizarre. Baffling. All true – until we consider that Trump is not actually a conservative.
His populism shares some fronts with the right – especially his war on the Ivy League – but this is coincidence as much as it is ideology at play.
By even a loose definition of the term, Trump’s revolution is not a conservative one. And it is not global in its ambitions. He doesn’t do foreign. His domestic movement lacks conservative foundations; its global emulators are few and getting fewer. The political interests of the Canadian Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, did not register at all in the Trump White House. Could you contrive a name more likely to annoy the MAGA crowd?
Kemi Badenoch (in London) and Peter Dutton (in Canberra) have taken note. But the prospects of both have likely dimmed anyway. Even Nigel Farage no longer wants to bask in Trump’s sunshine. Leaders of the right need to stop assuming they have an ideological soulmate in Washington.

Et tu, Lynch mob?

Strange, back in the days of the election, the Lynch mob seemed to view the ascendant mango sun god with remarkable complacency ...

...Lynch, whose research focus is US domestic and foreign policy and party politics, said one of the biggest appeals of Republican candidate Donald Trump is his ability to evoke nostalgia amongst voters – in both an economic and social stability sense.  
“The further we are away from [when] Trump won, the more Americans seem to view that four-year period [of his presidency] –  ’17 to ’21 – through rose-tinted spectacles,” he told the Fiduciary Investors Symposium in Healesville, Victoria.  
During this time, Lynch said Trump has prospered in a context where inflation was under control, job growth was strong, and many Americans “seem to want a version of this back”. 
“In the disaster of Covid, and we can argue about Trump’s role in that, but certainly the economic ramifications of Covid made Trump’s pre-Covid period look like the happy times,” Lynch said. 
“And Americans, about 80 million of them, it seems, are about to affirm their nostalgia for this lost administration – an administration that probably would have had a second term had there not been a virus.” 
Another form of nostalgia, despite being somewhat of an exaggeration, is that there will be “world peace” under Trump. Lynch said it’s hard for people to get away from the historical facts that when Trump was in office, Russia seemed “quiescent”; a withdrawal was planned from Afghanistan; and tensions in the Middle East were muted by the Abraham Accords.  
“Exaggerations, caricature is very powerful motivation in a voter’s mind,” Lynch said. 

Happy days, but that was then, and this is now, and the reptiles flung in a snap of the object of Faux Noise's worship ...President Donald Trump waves as he departs on Air Force One from Selfridge Air National Guard Base.

The prating Prof was determinedly gloomy as he offered the hive mind assorted understandings of real conservatism.

They might usefully ask what is conservatism? The answer will depend on who is asking it, when and where. For the late, great Roger Scruton “conservatism is neither automatic hostility toward the state nor the desire to limit the state’s obligations toward the citizen”. Trump has much of this hostility (unless L’État, c’est moi) and desire (unless the citizen is his base).
We can imagine Trump being asked what Edmund Burke would think of his leadership. Would Trump tell an aide to get him on the phone. “He’s Irish? Demand he reshore our tech to America!”
A conservative, said Russell Kirk, is a “type of character with an inclination to cherish the permanent things in human existence … that will resist the reduction of human striving to material production and consumption”. This doesn’t describe Donald Trump.
American neo-conservatism – with its wars of foreign liberation – are anathema to the current president. He disdains John Bolton, his hawkish former national security adviser, as much as he does his progressive enemies. Bolton went on to pen a 500-page memoir excoriating the “confusion and disorder” of Trump 1.0. In revenge, his former boss withdrew his Secret Security protection.
The conservative charge sheet against Trump is getting longer. He has buddied up to Russia, the great foe of western conservatism for over 100 years. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, a solid conservative until Trump nominated him, has been complicit in the denigration of Ukrainian liberty. Ronald Reagan was a hero to the Eastern Europeans colonised by Moscow; Trump seems to prefer the coloniser.

At that point the reptiles dropped in a snap of an elbows up loser, doing a John Howard in relation to his seat, but thanks to the beguiling Canadian system, still thinking about running the opposition from outside parliament ... Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre

The Lynch mob kept on with a full Pilate washing of the paws ...

Does President Trump, we are entitled to ask, admire Xi Jinping more for his autocracy than he does Taiwan for its freedom? Conservatives, of pretty much any stripe, would lean toward the beleaguered island Republic. With Trump, we cannot be sure; he is not a conservative.
Trump lacks an anchor in American conservatism. His connection to conservative variants abroad is thus tenuous at best. He has read none of the great books which define conservatism, let alone those by non-Americans like Burke and Scruton. Trump’s tariffs would have Scotland’s Adam Smith turning in his grave.
His trade protectionism defies the wisdom of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962). Even the digestible tract by Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), when Trump was 14, the age at which I read it, has eluded him. It set Ronald Reagan on the path to the presidency; Trump has no equivalent philosophical source.
He stands outside the ideological lineage we expect of presidents. The weak alliances across intellectual space have been replicated in the thinness of his alliances with other world leaders. Ronald Reagan found a unique comrade in Margaret Thatcher – the duo has a fair claim on winning the cold war.

The reptiles then did a most unfortunate thing ... they provided a visual link between Nige making plans and the Duttonator, Nigel Farage, Peter Dutton

It was a form of visual defamation, especially as Nige had the better hand gesture and spiv sunnies, and the appalling contrast did nothing to lighten the prof's mood ...

Trump enjoys no comparable relationship. He likes Viktor Orban and Narendra Modi. But what grand strategic ambition unites Hungary and India’s fate with Trump’s America? He tariffed them both. Hungary’s political opposition, like Canada’s, has been reborn.
How should the Coalition deal with all this? Not much to be done now. But the next Australian election will likely unfold during Trump’s final months in office. Who the two parties will have rolled into their respective leaderships by then we cannot be sure. The challenge for the Liberal leader, however, we can sketch out.
Between now and then he or she must wisely adapt Trump’s success. Or, if Trump 2.0 tanks, offer a more commonsense conservatism for Australian consumption. This means adopting clearer, popular, cultural positions – like scepticism of multiple national flags and acknowledgements of country – without declaring a culture war.
It means embracing the logic of nuclear power, in our submarines and energy grid, the necessity of adequate national defence, and the benefits of free and open trade. If the Trump, or any other, administration cannot see the advantages of alliance with such an Australia, then we face a strategic rethink unparalleled in our ­history.

He or she? Say what? 

The pond had to read that line a number of times. Did the babbling blabbermouth prof have some inside gen on a palace coup that might see Sussan or some other leading womyn leading the Lib show after the election?

Or did he simply have his wires crossed, and confuse the Liberal leadership with ...Kemi Badenoch

There didn't seem any point in idle speculation because the prof was intent on wrapping things up with a flourish of radicalised defiance ...

Around the world, the second Trump term seemed to offer leaders of the right a moment of opportunity. It is turning into an era of challenge. Trump is a revolutionary but has no ideology. It is proving hard to ally with him and to emulate his approach. The creedal passions he has channelled into the presidency are just too nationally specific to offer a global ­blueprint.
Trump can stir things up but not settle them down. The latter is what conservatives do. We resist change until change is harmless. That is not how his second first 100 days will be remembered. Instead, we are witnessing a new birth of American exceptionalism. And, as the word suggests, that is very hard to copy.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Never mind ...

"...Americans, about 80 million of them, it seems, are about to affirm their nostalgia for this lost administration – an administration that probably would have had a second term had there not been a virus.” 
Another form of nostalgia, despite being somewhat of an exaggeration, is that there will be “world peace” under Trump. Lynch said it’s hard for people to get away from the historical facts that when Trump was in office, Russia seemed “quiescent”; a withdrawal was planned from Afghanistan; and tensions in the Middle East were muted by the Abraham Accords.  
“Exaggerations, caricature is very powerful motivation in a voter’s mind,” Lynch said. 

The pond had just the right immortal Rowe to help celebrate the prof bury those great days of peace and plentiful prosperity ...

And so to the bonus, and here the pond must award an "also ran" prize to Johnsie ...

Smart Energy Council’s charity status is pure farce 
The Charities Act is so flawed that if a group claims its purpose aligns with a charitable goal, there is little opportunity to debate the costs and benefits to the public. The not-so-smart Energy Council is living proof.
By Gary Johns

It was good to see Johnsie back where he belonged -  he's also been slack at the Speccie mob - but how could the pond ignore the art of the reptile splash ...

Just look at that snap of windmills, busy killing whales, and that demonic insert of Satan himself with a treacherous, sinister air about him ...

Windmills also turned up at the head of the yarn ...

The header and sub said it all: Spain’s blackout is a flashing warning light for our renewable energy system, In just five seconds, a power grid supplying nearly 60 million people collapsed. Spain in 2025 is a flashing warning light for the electricity system we’re building around weather-dependent generation.

The caption for those monster whale killers: Wind turbines in Burgos, northern Spain, on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

The Macbeth-like incantation: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The reptiles reckoned it was a five minute read, but the unadulterated hysteria made it perfect for the hive mind ...

The blackout on the Iberian Peninsula on Monday should keep every Australian energy minister awake at night. In just five seconds, an electricity grid supplying nearly 60 million people collapsed.
Spain in 2025, like South Australia in 2016, is a flashing warning light for the electricity system we’re building around weather-dependent generation.
Rising power bills are already signalling the cost of this transition. Blackouts are the proof of its fragility.
To understand why, keep one iron law in mind: in an electricity system, supply must match demand every second of every day. The moment that balance slips, the system begins to fail.
Electricity flows through the grid at a constant frequency, which is 50 hertz in Australia and Spain. Think of it as a rhythm; the steady beat of a metronome. Every generator and every appliance must stay in time. If a few fall out of sync, the system usually recovers. But if too many do, it’s like a drummer losing tempo in a tightly conducted orchestra. The harmony collapses – and so does the system.
Electricity systems were built around machines that spin big wheels – coal, nuclear, hydro, gas – whose speed sets the frequency of the grid. It is an engineering marvel with a century of experience behind it. These are called synchronous generators. The big wheels inside them, spinning at 3000 revolutions per minute, don’t just produce power. They also help stabilise the system. They keep the rhythm steady and absorb shocks when something goes wrong.
Wind and solar work differently. They generate only when the sun shines or the wind blows, regardless of when power is actually needed. That means supply often peaks when demand doesn’t and can vanish when demand surges. And because they don’t spin large wheels, they can’t directly support the grid’s frequency. Their electricity has to be converted, through inverters, to stay in time with the grid.
But when trouble hits, these inverter-based generators can’t offer the same stabilising force. They can’t ride through shocks.
So, what happened in Spain?

Yes, yes, the pond realises that some might have headed off to the Graudian for an answer, and come across Minister warns against blaming Spain’s blackout on renewable energy

The reptiles weren't having any of that sort of stuff, and naturally seized the chance to slip in an AV distraction featuring the climate science-denying dog botherer, Sky News host Chris Kenny discusses the blackouts in Spain and Portugal and how they reflect the future of a renewable-only Australia. “They say the rains falls mainly on the plain in Spain but Spain also has a similar climate to South Australia, so they get plenty of sunshine and wind,” Mr Kenny said. “Their leftist politicians are right into renewables … and hey presto, yesterday we got a glimpse into our own future.”

It was full doom and gloom - approach what climate scientists are saying with full equanimity and certainty - though the pond couldn't help but again be reminded of that already featured First Dog ...

That seemed about right ... as the unreformed seminarian rabbited on ...

At 12.33pm on Monday, local time, Spain’s electricity system was running smoothly. According to Eduardo Prieto, director of services at Red Electrica, the ­national grid operator, about 18,000 megawatts were coming from solar, 3500MW from wind and 3000MW from nuclear.
Roughly two-thirds of supply came from wind and solar, with just one-third coming from ­traditional spinning machines.
Then came a sudden loss of generation in the southwest, home to massive solar farms. The system absorbed the first hit. But just 1.5 seconds later, a second drop occurred. Demand surged onto the interconnector with France, which tripped from overload. Spain and Portugal were suddenly cut off from the rest of Europe. The peninsula became an electrical island. Without enough internal synchronous generation, frequency collapsed. Automated protection systems tried to isolate the fault, but the disturbance was too great. Two countries went dark.
In Prieto’s words, it was a sequence of events “incompatible with the survival of an electrical system”.
The grid had died.
Time will tell the full story. But the tale to date eerily echoes a warning made in a 2021 engin­eering paper by University of Queensland researchers Nicholas Maurer, Stephen Wilson and Archie Chapman. They found that when power systems rely heavily on inverter-based generators like wind and solar – especially above 70 per cent of total supply – the grid becomes dangerously vulnerable to sudden disturbances. Their simulations, using Australia’s National Electricity Market as a model, showed that the system could survive a single failure. But if a second shock followed too quickly, there wasn’t enough time to recover, and the system would cascade into collapse.
Sound familiar?

At this point, the pond should slip in the rest of that Graudian piece. 

Much of what was said could also be found in Spanish PM calls on private energy firms to help find cause of massive power cut, Pedro Sánchez says changes needed to guarantee ‘supply and future competitiveness’ of electricity after blackout.

Please, a moment for the Spanish to speak of Spain ...

...It said blackouts “could become severe, even leading to an imbalance between production and demand, which would significantly affect the electricity supply”.
Aagesen insisted that renewable energy was vital if Spain was to remain a competitive and strategically autonomous power producer.
“We have native resources – the sun, the wind – in our country and we don’t have fossil fuels or uranium,” she said. “We do have sun and wind and I think a lot of businesses share our commitment to transforming our energy system and making it more and more renewable.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Red Eléctrica’s president, Beatriz Corredor, said the company knew what had caused the blackout but was still poring over a huge amount of data.
“We know the cause and we have it more or less tracked down, but the thing is there are millions of pieces of information because signals are sent every millisecond,” Corredor told Cadena Ser radio.
Corredor said she would not be resigning over the incident, adding: “To do so would be recognise that the correct actions weren’t taken, and that wasn’t the case.”
She also insisted it was incorrect to link the blackout to Spain’s increasing reliance on renewable energy. “The renewables mix is safe and it can form part of all the safety systems of the electrical operating system,” she told Cadena Ser. “Linking what happened on Monday to renewables isn’t correct. Renewables work in a stable way.”
Sánchez himself has been blunter. “Those who link this incident to the lack of nuclear power are frankly lying or demonstrating their ignorance,” he said on Tuesday, adding that nuclear power generation was no more resilient than other electricity sources.
Sánchez summoned the heads of Spain’s private energy operators – including Corredor and representatives from Iberdrola, Endesa, EDP, Acciona Energía and Naturgy – to an urgent meeting on Tuesday evening to discuss the blackout. The prime minister has said the committee will be looking into the role of private energy companies and urged them to help the government get to the bottom of the blackout as soon as possible.
Aagesen said some of the operators had already provided huge amounts of data, with the rest of the information expected over the next few days.
“As soon as we know what caused this event, we’ll put all necessary measures on the table so that it doesn’t happen again,” she said.
The investigations are focusing on what happened at 12.33pm on Monday, when, for five seconds, 15 gigawatts of the energy that was being produced – equivalent to 60% of all the energy that was being used – suddenly disappeared.
Spain aims to generate 81% of its electricity from renewables by the end of the decade. Last year, a record 56% of its electricity came from renewable sources.

The reptiles responded with a snap of darkness, A woman uses her phone’s torch while she walks her dog as the street lies in complete darkness during a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian Peninsula. Picture: AFP

That sent the Ughmann into another paroxysm of pain, and fear, and loathing, remarkable really, because nothing about climate science seems to induce the same sort of suffering ...

The researchers also tested whether rapid-response tools like batteries providing “fast frequency response” could fill the gap left by the loss of big turbines. Their answer was no. Synchronous machines have mass and ­momentum. They act like shock absorbers. Digital fixes can react quickly, but they only buy milliseconds. They don’t stop a system from falling over.
We’ve seen this before – on September 28, 2016 – when South Australia suffered a statewide blackout. As Matthew Warren later wrote for the Australian Energy Council: “The more material issue was the insufficient levels of inertia in the system to slow down frequency changes and enable load shedding … in other words, the SA grid was configured in a way which made it more fragile.”
SA was the canary in the coalmine. Spain is the mine. And Australia is digging a very large hole for itself. The federal government wants 82 per cent of electricity to be generated by weather-dependent sources by 2030. And the more we have, the more fragile the grid will become.
These aren’t teething problems. They are structural flaws in a grid built around high levels of wind and solar without enough synchronous backup. Coal is closing. Nuclear is banned. We have limited hydro, and gas has been demonised by people who have no idea the grid won’t work without it. A group of six-year-olds with crayons would struggle to design a dumber set of policies.
But it’s worse than that because the costs and risks of this transition are being wilfully ignored, or actively withheld, from the Australian people.
The Albanese government has stopped promising lower power bills because that pledge hasn’t held anywhere wind and solar have been rolled out at scale. In Germany, California, Spain and the UK, the pattern is the same. Because wind and solar can’t match demand, they need a complex and costly life support system the old grid didn’t need. Batteries, gas back-up, pumped hydro and other firming sources cost billions to turn part-time generation into full-time electricity. Add the transmission lines and distribution upgrades to stitch it all together. No one in government knows the final price tag. But know this: you will pay it.
There is no nuclear-powered France to save us. Our interconnectors lead only to other fragile regions. The only true backup to renewables is 100 per cent firm generation. And don’t believe what federal and state governments say – watch what they do. In NSW and Victoria, deals are being done to keep coal-fired power plants running because politicians know the next closure will see wholesale prices spike and grid reliability plummet.
Spain’s blackout is all the more alarming because, unlike Australia, it still has a solid base of reliable power. About 20 per cent of its electricity comes from nuclear and up to 15 per cent from hydro, depending on rainfall. These sources provide steady, inertia-rich generation that helps stabilise the grid during shocks. We are building a more fragile version of the Spanish system: more solar, more wind, less firming, and no link to a stronger grid.
The purpose of an electricity system is to deliver affordable, reliable power. Politics retooled it to cut emissions. We are engineering failure and calling it progress.

Yep, nuke the country, coal the country, and let the planet take care of itself.

Luckily, the infallible Pope was on hand to remind the pond that this sort of hate media meltdown is common ...and what joy, he too knew the power of supping on tears ...

And so back to Barraba ... and the pond's pick for the best Studebaker restoration ... with the money spent on the job it would likely have been possible to pick up a fine house in the hamlet ...oh the fins, the fins ...

It was the JFK on the rear window that sold the pond ...

The interior was a marvel ...

Talk about sleek lines...

That's not to put down other efforts...