The pond starts with a few distractions, but eventually gets around to business as usual with the dog botherer and the Ughmann ...

 

After the pond opened with AI yesterday, a kindly reader sent along a link to a wondrous piece of ancient arcana, Wendell Berry scribbling Why I Am not Going to Buy A Computer (included in a 2000 book, but here in pdf form).

Berry started with...

Like almost everybody else, I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire. I hope to become less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible. As a farmer, I do almost all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper.
My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then. As she types, she sees things that are wrong and marks them with small checks in the margins. She is my best critic because she is the one most familiar with my habitual errors and weaknesses. She also understands, sometimes better than I do, what ought to be said. We have, I think, a literary cottage industry that works well and pleasantly. I do not see anything wrong with it.
A number of people, by now, have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a computer. My answer is that I am not going to do it. I have several reasons, and they are good ones...

The pond will leave the reasons to those who hunt out the pdf. 

The pond's correspondent drew attention to a letter from one who responded to the piece, a certain Gordon Inkeles of Miranda, California:

Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative: Wife - a low-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile of handwritten notes on Wife and you get back a finished manuscript, edited while it was typed. What computer can do that? Wife meets all of Berry's uncompromising standards for technological innovation: she's cheap, repairable near home, and good for the family structure. Best of all, Wife is politically correct because she breaks a writer's "direct dependence on strip-mined coal."
History teaches us that Wife can also be used to beat rugs and wash clothes by hand, thus eliminating the need for the vacuum cleaner and washing machine, two more nasty machines that threaten the act of writing.

While on low comedy, the pond found one line in this yarn irresistible, Pricey Trump-Edition Watch Ruined by Hilarious Spelling Flub (alternative archive link).

US$640!

...The watch was promoted as “one of 250” made, “So that attracted me,” Petit said.
Despite liking the style of the watch, Petit’s wife Melanie said she noticed the misspelling right away.
“The T is missing. It just says R-U-M-P,” she said. “How could they process this and go through something without checking their work?”
Ultimately, Petit said he is “very disappointed.”
“I wanted to do a special thing for her,” he said. “And we expected that it would have the integrity of the President of the United States and good follow-through.”

The integrity of King Donald I? 

Would you like a Trump University diploma or a 747 for that line? How about a spin of the bankrupt casino wheel?

There was a snap too, which compounded the pond's laughter ... 

...and now have a snack on Charlie Warzel's piece in The Atlantic, Trump’s Tactical Burger Unit Is Beyond Parody, Happy Meal Team Six (archive link) 

While arteries harden on a burger, time to harden the brain muscles by plunging into the weekend morass of the lizard Oz ...

Nothing to see there. 

Simpleton Simon's piece was given prominence, and a truly dire gif featuring lightning ...

INQUIRER
The Liberals face a new test: aspire … or expire
Beset by turmoil in the wake of its catastrophic defeat, the party faces a herculean task: how to stop a civil war.
By Simon Benson

Did the simplistic one replace nattering "Ned" this weekend?

Just below him was The Price is Wrong, maintaining the rage ...

EXCLUSIVE
Net zero without nuclear ‘impossible’: Nampijinpa Price
Liberal defector Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has told her new party that net zero emissions by 2050 is impossible without nuclear, as the conservative champion says Peter Dutton’s campaign ‘under-utilised’ her and was shackled by fear.
By Rhiannon Down

There's going to be some fine comedy in the coming months, with the reptiles determined to play along.

Over on the extreme far right, the Ughmann was, at least early in the Saturday morning, top of the world ma ...

For reasons that can only be described as perverse, the pond decided to ignore Dame Slap, this day performing as MAGA cap wearer shouting at hopeless youff, and instead to go with the dog botherer ...

Partly this was because of a mention by the venerable Meade in the Graudian ... Sky After Dark host launches furious spray at ABC for broadcasting ‘far-left activist’ spouting ‘partisan rubbish’

Of course the pond wanted to honour the mention ...

When youth media boss Hannah Ferguson was given a platform at the National Press Club to bemoan that “Rupert Murdoch is the conservative mouthpiece for the English-speaking world”, it was all too much for Chris Kenny.
Ferguson announced she planned to run as an independent Senate candidate in 2028, and took aim at the Murdoch media, saying it “presents a departure from our reality”.
The Sky After Dark host was furious the “far-left activist” was spouting “partisan rubbish” at the Canberra institution, and unimpressed the ABC broadcast her address live.
The previous night, Sky’s Kenny Report had lambasted the ABC for presenting the content creator as a “political insider” on Gruen, where she was invited to discuss the election, when in Kenny’s view she was “anything but neutral”.
Kenny delivered a speech on Sky about Ferguson’s press club appearance that neatly summed up his worldview: “It was broadcast by the ABC, of course, and it included plenty of the usual extreme-left bile directed at the Coalition parties, at News Corp media, or anyone else invested in the liberal democratic market capitalism model that’s delivered all of our success, prosperity and social advancement in the western world.”

She really did tweak his beard, or whatever a balding goat might offer as a subsitute.

It reminded the pond of the glory days way back when Liam Kenny wrote for Junkee In Defence Of The Chaser’s False Depiction Of My Dad Having Sex With Dog

Kenny is a staunchly neo-conservative, anti-progress, anti-worker defender of the status quo. He is an unrelenting apologist for the Liberal Party. He was one of Alexander Downer’s senior advisers at the time of the Iraq War. He’s been known to argue for stubborn, sightless inaction on climate change. He spits at anyone concerned with such trivialities as gender equality, environmental issues or labour rights from his Twitter account on a daily basis. Recently, he characterised criticism of the lack of women in Tony Abbott’s Cabinet as a continuation of the Left’s “gender wars”. He is a regular and fervent participant in The Australian’s numerous ongoing bully campaigns against those who question its editorial practices and ideological biases. The profoundly irresponsible, dishonest, hate-filled anti-multiculturalist Andrew Bolt has recently referred to Kenny on his blog as “a friend”.
And it’s a jokey picture of a bestial embrace that I should be afraid of discovering online?

In turn that reminded the pond of Liam's attempt at a musical career, with these insights revealed in a Vice promotional interview Premiere: Liam Kenny ‘Border Fetish

The White Man Is Oppressor, is an album that has Kenny exploring privilege, guilt, the personal and the patriarchal through music influenced by Aerosmith, Ramones and The Rolling Stones. It actually sounds a lot better than that sentence reads.
By his own accounts Kenny grew up in a comfortable middle class childhood in Adelaide. His father Chris Kenny, is a conservative commentator and former political advisor. Liam’s earliest musical memories were of listening to tapes his parents played in the car; Nirvana Unplugged, the best of Leonard Cohen, and REM albums.

REM? Leonard Cohen? Nirvana? Perhaps even a whiff of teen spirit in the shagging wagon?

The pond hates to go Freudian, but what alternative is there? 

There's something deeply weird, something deeply conflicted about the man ...

The header: Smoke and mirrors: truth goes MIA in a world full of spin and deception, In the age of information, people are becoming isolated in digital silos where beliefs are seldom stress-tested.

The caption, beneath that snap of towers - how the reptiles love their tower shots in a deeply Freudian way: “Renewables proponents are free to advocate all they like but when bills go up or power is in short supply, reality catches up.”

The mystical desire to be somewhere else: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

There is nothing new to see, hear, or learn from this outing. It's just the pleasure of the stroll through the hive mind.

The dog botherer has lapsed into sullen, surly resentfulness, and so compiled a listicle of all his current fears and loathings ...

All anyone needs to do is sing along ...

With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto, an albino
A mosquito, my libido
Yeah
Hey
Yay
I'm worse at what I do best
And for this gift I feel blessed
Our little group has always been
And always will until the end
Hello, hello, hello, how low
Hello, hello, hello, how low
Hello, hello, hello, how low
Hello, hello, hello
With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us

He's stupid and contagious and here to entertain us, and that's more than adequate preparation for the whining and the whimpering ...

Truth is as golden as Lasseter’s Reef, but in our public debate it has become almost as hard to find. The battle against lies in politics is nothing new (Winston Churchill said “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”) but we are losing it faster and more often.
How do we settle momentous issues of economics, science and engineering without coalescing around agreed facts? We need to confront reality rather than pretend it away, yet in the information age people are becoming isolated in digital silos where facts are seldom stress-tested.
The times do not value truth. To observe that someone with a penis is not a woman is to invite scorn and censure; we are expected to go along with the chosen pronouns of individuals rather than prioritise the rights of biological women and girls.
We see university students, no less, align their activism in support of Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza with their support for LGBTIQA+ rights. Queers for Palestine is not an ironic tagline or a bizarre suicide pact but an earnest group of pro-Palestinian protesters – what next, Yazidi women for Islamic State?

The reptiles didn't help by featuring snaps designed to maintain the dog botherer's agitation ...Pro-Palestinian protesters rally to protest the Gaza war.

Even King Donald has noticed that mass starvation is being used in a way that's a war crime ...

It'll take a long time for that news to reach the antipodes, or at least the reptile hive mind, and might never reach the dog botherer ...

Palestinian protesters also have displayed placards linking their cause to climate action. It defies belief that such absurdity can exist, let alone be taken seriously.
Even after our federal election Labor Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is persisting with a $600bn price tag for the Coalition’s nuclear power plan. This is a fabricated figure, a wildly exaggerated number five times higher than credible estimates, and it comes from a Labor-aligned renewable energy lobby group – it is a lie.
Yet those who have called this out most stridently from the right-of-centre happen to be the same people who promulgated the falsehood that the Uluru Statement from the Heart was 18 or 26 pages long. If you want to demand honesty in political debate you need to stand on solid ground yourself.

A Sky Noise down under AV distraction spurred on the dog botherer's sullen sense of impotent rage, 

Government Accountability Institute President and author Peter Schweizer has commented on new accusations from China, suggesting that COVID-19 originated in the US. “China doesn't take responsibility for anything. They never have,” Mr Schweizer told Sky News host James Morrow. “The notion that ultimately COVID was the fault of the United States is absurd.”

Such was the extent of the dog botherer's rampaging resentment that he even did a Killer Kreighton style rant on Kovid ...

We were lied to ad nauseam during the Covid-19 pandemic. This was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, Victorian premier Daniel Andrews declared, insisting there was a social duty to get the jab as he locked his state down and even imposed curfews without medical advice.
Our own government secretly censored social media to take down factual posts about the inability of vaccines to prevent virus transmission or the ineffectiveness of lockdowns. We were told lies about the origins of the virus, the threat it posed to the healthy and the young, the relative risks from vaccines, the effectiveness of masks.

People were arrested for daring to dissent. Yet so thin is our society’s commitment to honesty and transparency that the politicians have been able to avoid a full royal commission into the pandemic response. After colluding to spread fear rather than facts, most of the media is happy to leave it all unexamined. No apologies have been forthcoming.
The climate and energy debate is broadly disdainful of reality. Think about how often we are told renewable energy is the cheapest form of electricity and then examine what its rollout has done to our power costs.

Another snap helped fuel the always simmering dog botherer's denialist rage. 

What use talk of nuking the country to save the planet for the next three years? Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is persisting with a $600bn price tag for the Coalition’s nuclear power plan.

How the hive mind recoils in fear and loathing at the sight of this arch villain.

Anyone familiar with the dog botherer will know that there's always a burst of distortions, misinformation, misrepresentation, and bald lying when it comes to any mention of climate science, and here it comes...

Bowen offers the oxymoron that “reliable renewables are securing the grid” – a complete inversion of reality. He insults the intelligence of voters but is seldom interrogated on the facts.
Proponents are free to advocate for renewables all they like – there are rational arguments to be made – but pretending away the central weakness of intermittence is delusional. If renewables are reliable and cheap, then war is peace and ignorance is strength – when bills go up or power is in short supply, reality catches up with spin.
On global warming we are constantly fed forecasts and opinions as fact, even when they fly in the face of the empirical record. During Cyclone Alfred in March, Anthony Albanese said “the science tells us that there would be more extreme weather events” and “anyone who looks at the science knows that that is what is occurring”.
In fact, the science shows tropical cyclones in Australia have become less common; even the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water’s Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub notes the “overall number of tropical cyclones recorded in the Australian region has decreased significantly in recent decades”.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts cyclone frequency will continue to decline with a possible increase in intensity.
After most bushfires and floods we hear activists, politicians and media refer to new records as they misuse the word “unprecedented”. A quick check of the record often exposes their claims – our worst bushfires and floods in most locations occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries.
On January 24, 2019, the Bureau of Meteorology proclaimed a record maximum of 46.6C for Adelaide, claiming it was the hottest maximum ever recorded in an Australian capital city. Yet almost exactly 80 years earlier, on January 12, 1939, the maximum recorded in Adelaide was 47.6C, a full degree hotter.

What a singularly stupid man he is, how jaded and tired is that routine of plucking dates and making idle, meaningless comparisons.

To attempt to argue would be to doom the pond to a tedious, tiresome round of non sequitur nonsense.

Time for another snap to make sure the dog botherer hares off in other directions, Transgender rights activists hold a protest earlier this month against the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The upside? How pleasing it was to see Fergusion tweak the old goat's beard and send him off in a frenzy...

What a relief, what a break from the relentless spewing of bile ...

When questioned, the BOM advised it had revised down or “homogenised” the earlier records, as it has done with much of the historical temperature data. So the record it proclaimed only occurred because it had lowered, ex post facto, the earlier record.
The bureau will defend its scientific processes; fair enough. But if it were really interested in facts and transparency, it would at least include footnotes and be upfront about its revisions.
Then there is the constant and nonsensical deceit (and conceit) that emissions reductions in Australia can change the climate. The science is clear, we can make no discernible difference.
On Middle Eastern affairs we are constantly told that Hamas terrorists in Gaza are fighting against Israeli “occupation”. Yet Israel withdrew completely from Gaza, including forcibly removing Israeli farmers and settlers, two decades ago.
The term genocide is used to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza when the latter’s population has been growing faster than Israel’s and their energy, health and food supplies have been facilitated by Israel all along. We have never seen a war previously where so much care has been taken to warn civilians about attacks and provide pathways and ceasefires for safe passage.
Figures provided by Hamas-controlled agencies about the number of Gazans killed are shared by the world’s media without accounting for the fact that about half of the dead are terrorists and many others have died of natural causes.

Natural causes? Give the man a RUMP watch ...

That's the best bullshit he can muster, and even worse, the reptiles dared to suggest some damage might have been done to hospitals, A total of 122 health facilities have been affected, leaving more than 90 per cent of Gaza's hospitals damaged or destroyed.

How long before the dog botherer disappears up his fundament and implodes?

In the first weeks of the war global media reported that Israel had bombed a hospital and killed 500 people when no such thing happened – a missile fired by a Hamas-aligned group landed off-target and killed up to 200 people.
Unsurprisingly for Islamist terror groups, the wild claims from Hamas and its affiliates are often the polar opposite of the reality. Yet they are amplified and endorsed by much of the media and political debate before verification.
On social media there is an unholy confluence of hidden agendas, misinformation, artificial intelligence and malevolent actors that feeds directly into the minds of our population, especially the young. And the algorithms ensure that whatever falsehoods intrigue us will be repeated and reaffirmed on constant loop.
As traditional media becomes more polarised, the silo effect is accentuated and we see far too few examples of people with differing views debating issues directly, so that we might at least come to an agreed set of facts on which to base our disagreements.
The one shining light of the federal election campaign was that we had four debates of differing formats fostering a contest of ideas and information – the trouble is most people probably consumed it through social media tidbits and hot takes.
These are immensely challenging times. Increasingly we are picking our way through a hall of mirrors.
There must be a constituency for truth because it will always win out in the long run. What we are missing are platforms that dare to confront all issues from all sides with the aim of arriving at basic truths, even if we disagree about how to address them.

Oh indeed, indeed ...

I feel stupid and contagious

And now for another visual distraction, thanks to Luckovich ...

No rest for the wicked, as the pond plunged on, into the mentally challenging morass known as the Ughmann ...

Sure, it's more of the same ... Just say the quiet part out loud, Mr Bowen, Whatever Australia does to reach net zero will be a futile and expensive exercise in virtue signalling as Chris Bowen seeks the presidency of the UN Climate Change Conference in 2026.

Sure it features a truly pathetic use of "virtue signalling", a sign of a diseased and ailing mind, and sure it's a five minute read, but it's a sign of what really obsesses the reptiles ... yes, at the very start, there was another snap of the arch villain, designed to wind up the hive mind ...

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen speaks at the National Press Club in Canberra. Omitted from the minister’s post-election victory dance is any claim electricity prices will fall in this term of government. Picture: Martin Ollman

An important part of the hive mind is the reptiles' ability to chant in unison, to perform as if in a murmuration of starlings...

Election victories don’t deliver the kind of power that keeps the lights on. The grid relies on the unforgiving disciplines of physics and engineering, dynamics that Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen continues to treat as secondary to spin.
In these pages Bowen has declared victory, again, long before anything is actually won. He claims Labor’s win is an endorsement of a plan that derailed in the government’s first term.
Lest we forget, in 2021 Bowen claimed his energy blueprint would deliver a $275 electricity price cut based on modelling that now lies buried with the pledge. This proved so fanciful that $6.8bn in taxpayer money has been torched in subsidies to dull the power bill pain.
Like so many things omitted from the minister’s post-election victory dance is any claim electricity prices will fall in this term of government. If he had confidence in his rote declaration that wind and solar would soon deliver cheap power then he should have the courage of his convictions and tell us when this distant dream would be realised.
Bowen is also silent on when energy subsidies will end, exposing consumers to the true cost of this transition.
Let’s see how long the silent majority stays mute when that shoe drops. Or is the Ponzi scheme of recycling taxpayer dollars to partially compensate consumers for rising power prices now a permanent feature of the plan?

How it pisses the reptiles off that all their blather amounted to a hill of beans in the last election cycle. 

How surly and sullen they are when confronted by snaps of those who did them down, Anthony Albanese on the campaign trail in Western Australia with Energy Minister Chris Bowen.

The pond long ago gave up arguing with the reptiles, full of discontent, and relentless distorters of half-baked science, as you might expect from unreformed former seminarians ...

The minister is right about two things: “Australians want an affordable plan (and a) reliable energy grid.” His pathway won’t arrive at either destination and his essay is a study in selectivity.
The minister boasts that there are 10 times more solar arrays in Blacktown, a suburb in his western Sydney electorate, than in the wealthy digs of Bondi. That may be because 84 per cent of Bondi’s homes are flats and apartments, while 80 per cent of Blacktown homes are freestanding.
The alliteration is trite, the canard typical. People do like rooftop solar and it has its place, but the grid won’t run on it even if every house has a battery.
In boasting that three northwestern Sydney suburbs have the highest take-up rates for Labor’s electric vehicle discount the minister, again, makes interesting choices: Baulkham Hills, Marsden Park and Kellyville. All rank among western Sydney’s wealthiest areas.
The minister chides “conservative commentators … who don’t actually spend much time in regional and suburban heartlands”. If expecting honesty from politicians makes me a conservative, then consider me a digital Disraeli. And I lived in Sydney’s sprawling west for a decade in the 1980s and was a security guard at what was then called Mt Druitt Market Town.

TMFI and deeply pathetic to boot ... will anyone tell him that Mt Druitt isn't really west? 

Why it's not even within cooee of the black stump. But do go on ...

The minister should publish a postcode guide to EV subsidy uptake rates so we can see where the hardscrabble suburbs near Mt Druitt sit. It’s a fair bet there are few Teslas in Tregear.
These sins of omission are common currency for the habitually intellectually dishonest “energy transition” boosters. As these two examples spotlight, among its many problems, building a weather dependent grid will deliver a profoundly unequal two-tiered energy system.

As if having the Ughmann in print wasn't bad enough, the reptiles insisted on featuring him on Sky Noise down under, Sky News Political Contributor Chris Uhlmann expresses his concern over Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen’s cheaper energy mandate, claiming a “big cost is on the way”. “Chris Bowen has a mandate to deliver cheaper energy prices, which is what he promised, and to get rid of the subsidies – and by the time they’re finished, would have spent $6.8 billion on subsidies,” Mr Uhlmann told Sky News Australia. “When does the government get rid of that? Because the price of electricity is going to continue to rise. “So, a big cost is on the way, and how do people swallow that?”

On and on he went, peddling the usual hive mind crap ...

Wealthy homeowners enjoy government subsidies for their electric vehicles, rooftop solar and batteries. This reshapes the market in ways that disproportionately disadvantage those who can least afford it.
While solar-and-battery households still rely on the grid for backup, they contribute less to its upkeep. The fixed costs of maintaining poles, wires and dispatchable generation are increasingly borne in the bills of a shrinking pool of full-time users.
As more affluent households partially disconnect from the system, that burden shifts to renters, apartment dwellers and lower-income households who lack the means to opt out. The more the wealthy game the system, the more the energy-poor pay to keep this essential infrastructure running for everyone.
With each new subsidy Labor is presiding over a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. This is deeply regressive progress.
The minister also believes the election results signal widespread support for Labor’s offshore wind plans. Well, build some and prove it. And let’s see what happens to the price of electricity when the first one is plugged into the national electricity market.
The minister cites the CSIRO’s GenCost modelling as the only worthy measure of power prices in the energy debate. A better indicator is the real-world experiment playing out in your electricity bill.
But if GenCost is Bowen’s benchmark, he would know that it warned both nuclear and offshore wind were at risk of 100 per cent blowouts in their construction costs because they were first-of-a-kind builds for Australia.
The low-end cost for offshore wind is reckoned at an already expensive $135-$175 a megawatt hour. If construction costs follow the same trajectory as Snowy Hydro 2.0 the price rises to a breathtaking $217-$303/MWh.
Offshore wind projects around the world are being scrapped or delayed as rising costs, supply chain bottlenecks, regulatory hurdles and shifting political winds take their toll. In the US, Orsted cancelled its Ocean Wind 1 and 2 projects in New Jersey, while Shell withdrew from the Atlantic Shores joint venture.
In Britain, Orsted also axed its Hornsea 4 development, citing cost blowouts and financial risk. Ireland’s €1.4bn ($2.4bn) Sceirde Rocks project has been shelved and two South Australian offshore wind projects also have been dropped.

How wretched does the Ughmann get? 

hy he dons a MAGA cap and he does the MAGA science dance, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright

Someone give the man a classy RUMP watch...

The international headlines on the path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 are equally dire and tell of a target in name only. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright has labelled net zero a “sinister” objective. China burns 58 per cent of the world’s coal, India’s fossil fuel consumption is rising sharply and Russia treats Western emission reduction targets as a joke. Those countries emit about 60 per cent of the world’s carbon; Australia is responsible for just over 1 per cent.
Re-engineering the electricity grid around the weather is proving absurdly expensive and diabolically difficult, as the recent blackout on the Iberian Peninsula proves. And that’s the easy part.
Finding ways to manufacture steel, cement, plastic and fertiliser without fossil fuel is still experimental, not a scalable reality. The cost of trying will be measured in the trillions.
A World Economic Forum report says the planet is spending about $3 trillion a year on the energy transition. To hit net zero, it estimates that figure will need to rise to $13.5 trillion annually by 2030 and exceed $15 trillion every year from 2031 to 2050.
No country is ever going to hit net zero without some very creative accounting. Whatever Australia does will be a futile and staggeringly expensive exercise in virtue signalling that will not make a jot of difference to the climate.
But virtue must be signalled* if Bowen is to win the coveted job of president of the UN Climate Change Conference in 2026.
Let’s hope he gets it. Australians need to see the world’s climate brahmins and green grifters fly their private jets into Adelaide to promote energy rationing for the poor. Apparently, all it takes to save the planet is “more ambition”. And theirs is limitless, so long as they don’t pay the price and the taxpayer picks up the tab.

* The pond routinely ignores reptile links because they always lead to some other part of the hive mind, but will note this one simply because it's so richly comic.

The link for "virtue must be signalled" led to this ...

Chris Bowen could be Peter Dutton’s best asset at May 3 election, If it appears Chris Bowen is keeping a low profile ahead of May 3, it might just be because he knows something most environment writers have not yet reported.
Chris Mitchell

Oh dear, a real Ozymandias routine ...

Ancient warriors fighting ancient, long lost battles, and yet all around is drear, lone, level and endless sand. 

How pitiful and pathetic, and yet how much fun to see ...

And to round out the fun, time for a closer with the immortal Rowe ...

It's always in the details, and while some might cherish the sight of freedumb boy waiting next to the roadkill 'roo, for the pond the winner was the kosmic karnival of klowns in their kar ... (the pond only does that because apparently alliteration irritates the heck out of the Ughmann).

Please, pay particular attention to the banjo plucker and the snorter and Little to be Proud of and the save d' (Tamworth) whale sticker ...