In which the pond distracts from its original Sunday meditation distractions with more distracting distractions ...

 

The pond was bemused to read in Crikey (sorry paywall) ...

New ABCs: At an all-staff meeting on Tuesday afternoon, ABC staff are getting a hint at what it’ll be like under the leadership of Hugh Marks, who took over from former managing director David Anderson. Marks brings a great deal of private sector experience, having last been CEO of Nine and leading it through its $4 billion merger with Fairfax in 2018. 
As part of the address, Crikey understands that the ABC is launching its new “key values” (whatever that means), as seen below in an apparent slide from a PowerPoint presentation. 

Whatever that means?

Foolish Crikey.

The pond has sure and certain knowledge what that first one, that noble "aim high" means...

Yes, it's the pond's alma mater, the good old Tamworth Public School, named in the days when they weren't afraid of the word "public", where "aim high" meant attending assembly and chanting in unison like a flock of pink and grey galahs ,'I love my country, I salute the flag, I honour the queen and I promise to obey her laws'.

Later to be followed by warm banana-flavoured, puke-inducing milk left out too long in the Tamworth sun.

The ABC didn't go the milk, they went the water, with Crikey explaining ...

We’ve even been sent an image of some supposed new emojis for staff to use in Microsoft Teams, and there are rumours that water bottles will be handed out as prizes for employees who embody the values.
Staff have been gifted new emojis to run amok with.
One wonders what the reception will be like for this latest show of corporate managerialism at the national broadcaster. —DS

Sheesh, they call them emojis?

Well DS (Daanyal Saeed?) here at the pond the reception was a retreat back on to nostalgia road and infantilism.

The pond digresses, because this is the last outing in an epic journey to make visible all the content in the pond's Sunday meditation that the Google bot insisted be concealed behind an age identification wall, an abomination to a pond devoted to the notion of privacy. 

If you insist, you can give your details to Qantas, and be assured of a good time...

So long ago...it feels like the Mesozoic Era, back when reptiles flourished...

The pond digresses because, in order to stand visiting the reptiles these days, the pond likes to do digressions.

It's the only way to stay sane.

Confronted by reptile inanity, why not take a moment to share the sort of obscenity that's ruining the planet?

Bill Gates is too ashamed to admit his folly? Is that why the Zuck keeps his fortress secret? Be out and proud like the bald one in Venice.

Never mind, when confronted by "Ned" and Polonius and Snappy Tom for its Sunday meditation, the pond immediately reached for distractions.

There were three the pond hasn't already covered in its recovery efforts, and they're now reflecting their age.

The first was the fun in The Bulwark's It's Starting to Smell Like Trump's Watergate?

That's now five days stale ...

...So we have Trump’s Justice Department all-in on executing Trump’s coverup. And unlike in the case of Watergate, we have no special counsel investigating and combating the coverup; we have no Senate Select Committee holding hearings to try to get at the facts; we have, as of yet, no conscientious individuals like John Dean who turned against the coverup after having been part of it.
This coverup could succeed.
But perhaps not. The fact that the Epstein-Maxwell crimes were so horrible will surely make the coverup more difficult to sustain. Trump was very close to Epstein and Maxwell during the years they were committing those crimes. I suspect more information will come out about their relationship.
So does JD Vance. Last night he complained, in response to the latest Wall Street Journal piece about the Epstein birthday book, “We all know what’s going to happen. They’re going to dribble little details out for days or weeks in an effort to assassinate the president’s character.”
Feel free to chortle, dear reader, about the notion that Trump has an upstanding character that is now being disparaged. But consider what the vice president is acknowledging: That more is to come. More “little details” like Trump’s incriminating birthday note. More little revelations of hushed Oval Office meetings. More little cracks in the Trump stonewall. More and more until, perhaps, it all comes crashing down.

Currently on view is the irresistible headline His Name Is Jesus. He's a Carpenter. ICE arrested him.

That helps in an appreciation of this Luckovich ...

The Epstein saga continued to bubble along, with Please, Mr. President, Keep Talking Epstein ...

Inter alia with Bill Kristol ...

...Trump was asked about his comment the day before in which he said he had cut ties with Epstein not, as he had previously maintained, because of a real estate dispute, but because Epstein “stole people who worked for me.”
Reporter: You’re saying Epstein poached two of your staffers?
Trump: . . . Yeah, he took people and because he took people, I said don’t do it anymore—they work for me. Beyond that, he took some others and once he did that, that was the end of him.
So Trump knew that Epstein “took” multiple “people” from Mar-a-Lago.
A reporter asked the logical next question: “Were some of the workers taken from you, were some of them young women?”
Trump began by answering, “Well I don’t want to say.” Perhaps Trump had an instinct he was getting into deeper waters. But he couldn’t resist continuing to talk. “Everyone knows the people who were taken.” So, he went on, “the answer is yes, they were.” And Trump provided a little more detail as he continued talking: “People were taken out of the spa . . .’”
Of course, it’s well known that when Ghislaine Maxwell approached Virginia Giuffre at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, the then 16-year old Giuffre was working at the spa. So a reporter asked: “Was one of the stolen people Virginia Giuffre?”
Trump kept on talking. “I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her.”
So: Trump knew that Epstein (and Maxwell) had “taken” or “stolen” Virginia Giuffre and “some others” from Mar-a-Lago. And, of course, Trump knew about Epstein’s proclivities for younger women at the time. Two years after Giuffre was “stolen” from him, he infamously told New York magazine that Epstein liked “beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Or as he reportedly wrote in his now-famous 50th birthday note to Epstein a year after that, in 2003, “Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?”

The pond enjoys the way they always include a cheap shot ...

... but the pond does wish sometimes they'd go the full loon, and expose the source material ...

Speaking of loons, a special shout out to Will Sommer for Dan Bongino, an Emotional Wreck, Throws QAnon a Bone, Plus: Nick Fuentes and Tim Pool rethinking their looks.

Forget Dan, it was the bit about the Groypers turning on Fuentes in Looksmaxxing Controversy that shook the pond to its carefully curated sagging flesh and failing bones ...

The second original distraction was the already referenced in these pages Susan B. Glasser outing in The New Yorker: Trump Redefines the Washington Scandal, In a Presidency where everything is an outrage, what does it say that MAGA’s revolt over the Jeffrey Epstein files is the one crisis that really might hurt him? (*archive link)

Trump’s strategy to win back his base unintentionally reveals what he thinks of them—throw them lies, new made-up lies to supplant the old made-up lies, and package them with as much visceral hatred and crude racism as possible. The purest distillation of this was an A.I.-generated video of former President Barack Obama being handcuffed in the Oval Office, which Trump promoted on his social-media account over the weekend.
This revolting clip seems to represent what Trump imagines to be the ultimate MAGA fever dream—a ritual humiliation and debasement of America’s first Black President. Accompanying the video has been an elaborate new conspiracy theory, rolled out by Trump and various advisers in subsequent days, that involves Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the former leaders of the U.S. intelligence community, and the Presidential elections of 2016, 2020, and 2024. Its main premise is that Russia did NOT intervene in 2016 on Trump’s behalf, and the intelligence finding that it did was part of an attempted “coup” against Trump that is allegedly still ongoing.
In Trump’s first term, when he said awful stuff like this, even many of his Republican allies publicly distanced themselves from it. There was squirming. There were embarrassed silences. Not now. If there were any G.O.P. members of Congress who denounced the disgusting video of Obama, I missed it. Not a single one, as far as I am aware, could be found to issue even a Susan Collins-esque statement of “concern.” Including Susan Collins. Instead, senators such as Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn on Thursday demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into the allegations, apparently having forgotten that there already was a special prosecutor—John Durham—who spent more than three years doing so and failed to come up with anything remotely like the Obama-and-everybody-else grand unification Russiagate theory that Trump is now promoting. Cornyn, it should be noted, was also a member of the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee who signed on to its bipartisan report concluding unequivocally that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
The point is that they’re still more than willing to go along with Trump’s lies so long as they don’t conflict with one of their other crazy stories. That goes for MAGA senators and for the MAGA base—and it explains why we’re in such a mess. Sorry, Jeffrey Epstein truthers; this is the biggest scandal of them all.

Indeed ...(and there was a cartoon to go with that)

But The New Yorker has moved on, and given the interest expressed by pond correspondents, likely the pond would have offered as a distraction Adam Gopnik's How Tom Lehrer Escaped the Transience of Satire, The late songwriter’s targets are mostly forgotten—so why do new generations keep discovering him? (*archive link)

A sample ...

And so on, and what a fine distraction.

The third original Sunday meditation distraction? 

That was introduced this way ...

And while at The New Yorker, the pond couldn't help but savour Tyler Foggatt's “South Park” Skewers a Satire-Proof President ( that's an archive link), The new season première goes after Trump as never before—and solves a problem that’s plagued comedians since his first term in office.

The pond is no fan of the show and has never watched it, but still ...(and here the pond is now liberal with *'s for fear of disturbing the easily offended Google bot):

The episode opens with Cartman turning on a radio station, where he’s met with the sound of static. “Mom, something’s wrong with my favorite show,” he complains. “National Public Radio, where all the liberals b*tch and whine about stuff.” His mother informs him that Trump has cancelled NPR. Cartman is devastated: “That was, like, the funniest sh*t ever.”
Later, Cartman confides in his friend Butters, who’s more of a snowflake type. “Woke is dead,” Cartman says, sadly. “You can just say ‘ret**ded’ now, nobody cares. Everyone hates the J*ws. Everyone’s fine with using g*y slurs.”
“That’s not good,” Butters replies.
“No, it’s terrible!” Cartman says. “ ’Cause now I don’t know . . . what I’m supposed to do.”
At first, it didn’t seem like “South Park” had an answer to this question; Cartman, unconvinced by Butters’s assurances that “woke” is “still out there, somewhere,” forces him into a s**cide pact. The two of them sit inside a car, parked in a garage, with the engine running. The scene is foreboding—until it’s revealed that the car is electric.
The townspeople, meanwhile, negotiate a settlement with the President, who agrees to a sum of $3.5 million. (“We’ll just have to cut some funding for our schools and hospitals and roads and that should be that,” one woman says.) But there’s one condition: as part of the settlement, the town also has to engage in “pro-Trump messaging”—an apparent reference to recent reports that Trump has demanded the same from CBS. What follows is genuine shock comedy, and a treatment of Trump that feels original. The town’s first P.S.A. is an A.I.-generated video of Trump—a live-action one, not a cartoon—trudging through a desert. He proceeds to take off his clothes, though he leaves his dress shoes and sock garters on. “When things heat up, who will deliver us from temptation?” a voice-over says. “No matter how hot it gets, he’s not afraid to fight for America.” Trump lies down in the sand, and his microp*nis, which has googly eyes and a mouth, slowly becomes erect, before announcing, “I’m Donald J. Trump, and I endorse this message.” The P.S.A. is labelled one of fifty, leaving open the possibility that, in the course of the forty-nine “South Park” episodes still to come, we’ll get forty-nine more.
Is this too much? Probably. Yet there’s an age-old tradition of political vulgarity, of which Trump himself is a practitioner—it’s the crux of his appeal. And, although the White House put out a statement condemning the “South Park” episode, it also seemed to acknowledge that Parker and Stone have a place in this tradition, too. “The Left’s hypocrisy truly has no end,” a spokesperson said. “For years they have come after ‘South Park’ for what they labeled as ‘offense’ content, but suddenly they are praising the show.” Though it’s hard to say that an A.I. d*ck joke is deserving of “praise,” it is refreshing to see what happens when satirists are willing to play on the President’s terms, deepfakes and all. One of the most striking aspects of Colbert’s firing is that his comedy, whether you like it or not, wasn’t all that offensive; “The Late Show” is standard liberal fare. But, by getting rid of that problem, Paramount has created a new one. They’re paying Parker and Stone more than a billion dollars to put out the same message as Colbert—a lot less politely.

(* did any of these words trigger the Google bot? Was this the cause of the pond's Sunday problem? Who knows, but the pond felt a certain chill descending. Better to be safe than sorry)

The pond then segued into Snappy Tom's column.

Of course all these stories are now aged and out of date.

The South Park saga later took another turn ...

‘South Park’ Delays Follow-Up to Explosive Naked Trump Episode
TO BE CONTINUED...
Comedy Central will air an encore of the season premiere that featured Trump naked. (*archive link)

The teaser promises a new episode next Wednesday, August 6, that has no intention of letting up on Trump. One scene shows Trump flirting with Satan at a black tie dinner, smirking and rubbing the character’s thigh until he says, exasperatedly, “Stop.” Like the premiere, the second episode will also mock Trump’s fiercest supporters. The teaser seemingly reveals Cartman playing a version of MAGA podcaster Charlie Kirk.
Still, the strangely-timed break seems unusual. While Trump has threatened other shows will be “next” to be canceled for criticizing him after Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, the White House’s statement last week settled for a series of insults and stopped short of threatening revenge. That omission from the White House’s response was out of step with Trump’s pattern, considering how brutally the episode mocked the president.
Parker and Stone actually toned it down, as they’d wanted an even more graphic version of Trump’s naked character. They compromised by putting eyes on Trump’s penis to get around the network’s request that they blur it. And while weekly TV shows take a week off all the time, a hiatus following a one-episode season premiere—especially one as explosive as last week’s—is highly unusual.
That said, Parker and Stone showed absolutely no remorse for their brutal Trump takedown even before the teaser for the next episode dropped on Tuesday. “We’re terribly sorry,” Parker sarcastically told a crowd at a San Diego Comic Con panel last Thursday after Trump’s White House fired back at them.

How the Beast loves the story, with fresh updates (*archive link)...

And so on and waay too much detail. 

Best put that in a screen cap, all that talk of micro appendages ...

The completely humourless self-centred narcissist and grifter has gone full fascist when it comes to comedy ...

Memories of him festering and simmering while Obama roasted him linger in the mind.

Trump’s Ominous Prediction in Searing Stephen Colbert Rant
‘WHO WILL GO FIRST?’
Trump took aim at more than one late-night host on Truth Social. (*archive link)

It's all grist to the new mill, the decline and fall of the American cultural empire...

Without a shred of decorum or decency, the rantings, foamings and frothings of a manchild monarch, given to whims, servile lackeys and very expensive luxury planes.

King Donald's narcissistic obsession with ratings is nothing new.

As a distraction from the original distraction, see the ancient Vanity Fair story Donald Trump’s All-Consuming Obsession with TV Ratings: A History, It started with The Apprentice, which Trump claimed was the No. 1 show on TV for years after it stopped cracking the top 20. (*archive link)

...So why are ratings still such a big deal to Trump? As Jacob Brogan observed in Slate during the campaign, Trump is more of a numbers guy than a words guy—and ratings are just one more metric against which he can measure himself and others. “He’s always talking numbers, one way or another,” Brogan wrote. “During one recent campaign stop, he counted up every reference that Hillary Clinton made to him in her Democratic National Convention address—22 in all. He also routinely talks polling data—mostly when the numbers are in his favor, but sometimes even when they’re not. But no single metric matters more to him than television ratings—so much so that even polls are secondary for him. ”
In the case of The Apprentice, this could explain why Trump—the king of self aggrandizement—seems unwilling to accept any narrative in which he doesn’t come out on top. Winning the presidency wasn’t enough for him—he must have won it by a landslide, even if he actually didn’t. Trump can’t just hold an inauguration—that inauguration must be the biggest one in history, one that’s rendered stores across Washington bereft of formalwear and hotels full to the brim. It seems that in Trump’s eyes, as long as he is on a show, it is No. 1—and he must be the reason why.
The irony in all this? Nielsen ratings, like polls, are subject to flaws of their own. They only gather data from traditional cable subscribers—so as streaming platforms proliferate and more and more viewers cut the cord, Nielsen ratings numbers grow more and more obsolete and out of touch with a certain growing subgroup of the American population.
However hypocritical or illogical Trump’s fixation on ratings is, it’s something opponents might want to keep in mind throughout his presidency—just as reporters must find ways to cover his false statements without inadvertently corroborating them for readers who don’t read past the headline. Citizens looking to hit Trump where it hurts may want to start by not watching his inauguration in the first place, since tuning in will only contribute to viewership numbers Trump will likely use as an objective sign of America’s infatuation with him. True, the inauguration ratings won’t discern who was watching and who was hate-watching—but neither will Trump.

And yet who can look away from the train wreck?

So many train wrecks, so many white rabbits and so little time...

And there you have it, an entire post without the reptiles starring.

Will the bot allow it? Only the bot knows, but that's it, that's all she wrote for this bot time and this bot channel ... with the pond having put up all of its Sunday meditation, and a lot for by way of distractions in the process, with the first class loser always present and incorrect ...

In which the Lynch mob and Jack the broccoli denier play substitutes for a cult groaning ...

 

Cultists addicted to Dame Groan will be shattered by her absence this day. 

Instead the reptiles led with an EXCLUSIVE dedicated to fear and loathing of Iran ...

The reptiles also finally got around to dealing with the question of famine in Palestine...

Not like this mob, here or here ...

... but by way of a gotcha directed at the ABC ...

MEDIA

ABC stands its ground on child starvation picture

Global media outlets are backtracking on their coverage of a malnourished Gaza child’s viral photo, but ABC’s Media Watch maintains its position.

By James Madden and Lydia Lynch

Inter alia ...

...In a post on X, The New York Times said it had added an editors’ note to its story after learning “after publication … that (Muhammad) also had pre-existing health problems”.
“We have since learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems,” it said in its statement.
“This additional detail gives readers a greater understanding of his situation.”
On Wednesday, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age also updated their online news reports featuring the picture of Muhammad to accurately “reflect the new information which has come to light”.
“After initial publication of the article, it was later reported that Muhammad’s doctor had confirmed he had pre-existing health problems, as well as severe malnutrition,” the update in Nine’s online mastheads reads.
But the ABC has made no concession that its news reports featuring the photo of Muhammad, and Media Watch’s analysis of the image, lacked context. Instead, the online transcript of Monday night’s Media Watch episode was amended on Wednesday night to only include reference to the clarification issued by The New York Times.
The ABC made no mention of the fact that at the time Media Watch went to air at 9.15pm (AEST) on Monday, Besser and the show’s producers were already aware of the claims made by Collier about Muhammad’s medical history, but chose not to mention them.
In response to questions from The Australian, Media Watch executive producer Mario Christodoulou said the program sought to verify the medical condition of Muhammad by showing the photograph of the toddler to a Sydney-based academic and asking her to provide a “professional opinion”.
“Not being in a position to verify Collier’s reporting, we contacted an authority on the subject of cerebral palsy, University of Sydney Professor Iona Novak, to garner as best an independent and professional opinion as possible in the time frame,” Christodoulou said.
“That opinion assured us that the ‘photographs appear to show a child with physical signs consistent with malnutrition’ as well as a potential ‘neurological condition’.
“In light of this, we were very careful to make plain that it was ‘the disabled and vulnerable … hardest hit’, as we introduced the photograph of al-Matouq.”

At no point did the reptiles bother to report on the current medical treatment available to the child, but instead they could rest content n the notion that talk of famine was but an idle dream...

Over on the extreme far right, the reptiles turned to the Palestine matter ...

Geoff chambered another round to be top of the world ma ...

PM’s Palestine push ahead of UN face-off

Anthony Albanese has sharpened his language in declaring he is ready to seize the ‘opportunity’ and fulfil a lifelong political aspiration to recognise Palestine as a state.

By Geoff Chambers

Chief Political Correspondent

Oh yes, it's a real rush, a real seizure, a scurry to a lifelong opportunity ...

Nick wasn't in favour of theocracies, except perhaps Zionist ones ...

A Palestinian state just the latest detour in gesture diplomacy

What kind of state are we recognising? A Hamas-run theocracy? Australia should not join a chorus of symbolic recognitions that ignores statehood prerequisites.

By Nick Dyrenfurth

Contributor

For a therapeutic alternative try Owen Jones in The Graudian, Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. It couldn't have done it without the west's help ...

"What have we done? If western elites had any shame, this question would be robbing them of sleep. And the answer would be straightforward. You facilitated the mass starvation of an entire people. You knew what was happening, because of a deluge of evidence for 21 months, and because the perpetrator – your friend – repeatedly boasted to the world about its crime. Alas, the architects of this abomination will not hold themselves to account. That will be left to history – and the courts."

Speaking of the 'leets, the pond has the perfect member of Melbourne Uni's 'leet to deal with the matter. Come on down Lynch mob, and explain how it's all reverse racism or some such in a full-throated five minute rant, and don't you worry about whether he sleeps, he sleeps superbly well ...

The header: Is the ‘anti-racism’ movement making us more racist?, Anti-racism has become a required opinion across the Australian public sector. Universities can’t get enough of it. It has become a cure-all for all sorts of discrimination, real and imagined.

The caption, done reptile style: Greens senator Mahreen Faruqi pictured at a press conference at the Teachers & School Staff for Palestine rally at Paul Keating Park in Bankstown. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

The indecent proposal: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The Lynch mob is a firm pond favourite. How else to defame the reputation of the University of Melbourne's reputation in one quick go?

Irving Kristol, the American ­neo-conservative thinker, said that left-wing solutions tended to compound the problems they sought to solve. Starting in the 1960s, reducing rates of crime, poverty and drugs were the focus of progressive policymaking. By the 1980s, each had increased.

Ronald Reagan quipped that Democrats had declared a war on poverty, but poverty won. Could the same be true of racism?

Could it be that the more progressives demand anti-racism, the more racism they end up with? That racism is winning the more the left wages a war on it?

I think Kristol’s maxim holds. Consider two arguments. First, that anti-racism generates a demand for racism for which a supply must be found. Second, that while inspired by some very good motives, anti-racism is prone to radical capture. As we have become more anti-racist we have ­become, ironically and but not ­accidentally, more anti-Semitic.

The first argument shouldn’t be controversial: anti-racism needs racism. It finds it where it might not actually exist or exaggerates it where it does. We have a Keynesian supply and demand situation. In the Anglophone West today, demand for racism is high. Careers dedicated to its eradication and to its study, both of which have grown exponentially, must find a ready supply of it.

You see? Only the Lynch mob could introduce the notion of the "Anglophone West" without the slightest sense of irony ...

At this point, the reptiles introduced a snap designed to shame Melboourne uni, Students set up a camp at Melbourne University in support of Palestine. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

And so to the real point. A defence of genocide, famine, mass starvation as a war tactic, and ethnic cleansing...

It is as if anti-racism is a radar, calibrated with ever greater sensitivity to what it seeks. It used to spot macro-aggressions; now it pings for micro ones.

To put this another way, we have seen a rise in racism because we have employed more people with an interest in finding it. And, as Upton Sinclair wryly noted: “No man has an interest in knowing something that will put him out of a job.”

The University of Michigan was a prolific spender on anti-­racism strategies. Its diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy was huge. Its 142 DEI staff (“diversicrats”) cost more than $US18m ($27m) in annual salaries. And yet, as the liberal New York Times reported, race relations on the Michigan campus got worse.

Anti-racism has become a required opinion across the Australian public sector. Universities can’t get enough of it. It has become a cure-all for all sorts of discrimination, real and imagined. It is a pristine form of American cultural imperialism, honed on US campuses, and absorbed on ours. Michigan was evidence that it does the opposite of what was intended.

The second argument follows the first: anti-racism invites extremism. It is inspired by some of the finest ambitions and animates decent people who abhor the scourge of racism and want to end it. I am on their side. The problem is how far this kindness doctrine gets co-opted by a much more radical conception of anti-racism.

A UK government report this month revealed what we already knew: British universities, where anti-racism is increasingly a belief required of its staff, have become hotbeds of protest against the world’s only Jewish state.

Many academics see opposition to Israel as modish. Racism gets you fired; intellectual Israelophobia gets you hired.

The funny thing is that the pond has routinely been called Islamophobic for being a dedicated atheist, but to be fair always urges a pox on all religions.

Where the pond draws the line is the notion that a state government like the current one in Israel should be allowed to get away with shameless criminality, and any comment on it dissed and dismissed as "intellectual Israelophobia" ...

Just to ensure there was a measured tone to the proceedings, the reptiles inserted a clip of the dog botherer ranting away on Sky Noise down under, a channel that "Ned" had recently advised the pond was a tempting, but damaging distraction, Sky News host Chris Kenny has reacted to a “disturbing” anti-Israel video which links anti-Israel rhetoric with anti-imperialism and Indigenous rights in a “bizarre rant”. “In this disturbing video, now the subject of a police investigation, the speaker claims responsibility for this car-bombing a week ago at a Melbourne technology firm involved in defence industry work, including for the Joint Strike Fighter used by the US, UK and Australia, among other nations, with technological co-operation from Israel,” Mr Kenny said. “The new threatening video even includes tips on how to firebomb cars. “This is worrying stuff, as you can see. And it comes hot on the heels of last week’s firebombing of a synagogue in Melbourne, and a violent anti-Israel protest at a Melbourne restaurant.”

Back to the Lynch mob warming to his task, in a way that inevitably precluded any consideration of what might actually be happening in Gaza at the moment ...

Australia is not immune. As The Australian’s Natasha Bita has reported, when Hamas killed 1175 Israeli and foreign nationals and took 251 hostages, an academic at the Queensland University of Technology described it as an “anti-racist practice”.

The more anti-racist we are trained to be, the more anti-Semitic we seem to have become. Campuses that have prioritised “cultural safety” find their Jewish staff and students have never felt less safe, culturally and physically.

In Australia, the NTEU did not support a Jewish professor attacked by anti-Israel students; they backed the attackers. The most insidious opponents Jews face in the West today are not neo-Nazis but those who self-identify as anti-­racist. Why?

A great failing of the university response to anti-Semitism is to think that its solution lies in so-called anti-racism strategies. In both theory and practice, anti-­racism is anti-Semitism. We have tapped a deep stream of the latter because of a well-intentioned embrace of the former.

Israel was once a poster child for liberation. The Holocaust had shown the consequences of government-sponsored anti-Semitism. Zionists were seen by many on the left as heroes of a struggle against European racism. The socialism of the kibbutz was applauded.

What changed? Two things. First, Israel became successful. While newly decolonised countries in the Middle East and Africa dabbled in Marxism, the tiny ­Jewish state, sitting atop zero crude oil, developed into a vibrant liberal democracy.

None of its Arab neighbours has ever gotten close to this achievement. Jealousy became an unavoidable component of Israelophobia.

Second, the intellectual left, confronted with Israel’s success, began to construe the state not as a brave experiment by a long-­oppressed people, but as a racially exclusive and capitalist power.

Some of the developing world’s worst dictators learned their Marxism in the lecture halls of Western universities. The African elites that took over when the British and French quit the scene quickly adopted anti-Zionism as their mantra. The United Nations became a global forum for it.

Israel jumped from the oppressed into the oppressor column. It has never been forgiven for ­winning the wars started by its ­“oppressed” enemies. A Zionism that was meant to give Jews a ­security denied them everywhere else was redefined into a racism that must be opposed in the one place it had a chance of survival.

Might not Israel have earned the jump into the oppressor column right at the moment by way of the current government's pandering to its most extreme far right elements?

Consider the Haaretz story, IDF Tells Israeli Ministers Conquest and Destruction of Gaza Will Risk Hostages' Lives After Far-right Demands (archive link)

Far-right ministers pressured the IDF to present a plan to conquer and destroy Gaza City, home to 1.2 million people. The army chief said the operation would take months and require extending active service or a large reserve call-up. Sources said Netanyahu did not rule out the plan

Consider these radical thoughts, When Will Israel Learn That Military Might Won't Bring It Security? (archive link)

Israel's security doctrine isn't only wreaking havoc in Gaza and the West Bank. It's also failing Israeli citizens, traumatized by years of conflict and cynical about any idea that favors equality over force

...it should also be obvious by now that no life improvements can substitute for national and political change. The accusation that Israel's change government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in 2021 and 2022 provided work permits in Gaza which led to violence is mendacious. Without a vision for independence, such tweaks are just attempts to placate Palestinians into submission, which is not lost on them.

Next, Israelis need to face a tough truth that suits no one's national narrative. Palestinians need security too – from Israelis.

Violence against Israelis is real: Nine have been killed in the West Bank in 2025 through June, according to the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; 28 and 22 Israelis were killed in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

Also according to OCHA's figures, Israeli soldiers or settlers killed 149 Palestinians in 2025 – 16 times more than Israelis, and 1,004 in 2023 and 2024 combined, 20 times more than Israelis. Israelis never internalize the imbalance: A back-of-napkin (Wikipedia-based) calculation finds that in the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, 29 times more Palestinians were killed (2,125, according to Israeli government sources, compared to 73 Israelis, six of them civilians. The same sources estimated that over 1,000 Palestinians were civilians).

The point is not to hold corpse competitions. It is that "security" cannot be considered without including Palestinian security, since the sides are intertwined and interdependent. If you think the logical answer is "separation," remember that in today's circumstances this means permanent Israeli control over trapped Palestinian enclaves at best, or in Israeli minds, it means separation of Palestinians from the land itself – i.e., expulsion.

The Lynch mob never quite makes it clear where he stands on the matter of expulsion or extinction, and the reptiles idea of helping was another alarmist snap, Pro-Palestinian rally with bring pots and pans theme to make noise for Gaza held in Melbourne from State Library of Victoria to NGV. Picture: Valeriu Campan

Terrifying to think of the Lynch mob in the thick of such an outrageous carry on ...

If this meant a progressive alliance with Israel’s Islamist enemies, so be it. The logic of identity politics turned the victims of the Holocaust into the agents of a new genocide.

Anti-racism does not tempt ­Islamophobia as it does anti-Semitism. If we follow the logic of identity politics, there is no reason why it should not. Muslims control some of the wealthiest real estate on earth. There are 1.8 billion Muslims (a quarter of the world’s population) and almost 60 Muslim governments. (None presides over a significant Jewish population.)

But Western anti-racists do not translate the advantages of the ummah materially or demographically into a claim against Muslim power. They do with Jews. Muslims are recurrently made to fit their oppressed status. University professors are not trained to call out Islamic homophobia – the Christian varieties we are.

Campuses in the zone conquered by Islamic imperialism do not face demands to decolonise. Israel and the wider West does. This is the logic of anti-racism and the identity politics that drive it.

Irving Kristol and Ronald Reagan began their ideological journeys on the left. Kristol was a Trotskyist, Reagan a Democrat. This gave them a crucial insight into their subsequent opponents. It was not the malevolence of progressives that made them dangerous, but their good intentions.

And so it is with anti-racism. A strategy that wants us all to get along is, in practice, dividing us ­racially. Rather than check racism, it has, accidentally and on purpose, helped rebirth its most ancient form.

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Well played Lynch mob, as reassuring as the notion that weapons don't need to kill, F-35 parts are harmless and so on and so forth ...

And so to a bonus, featuring Jack the Insider.

The pond doesn't usually bother. with Jack, but this day he was in top larrikin hive mind form ...

The header: A catastrophic future without broccoli? Bring it on, I say, The problem with providing persistent glimpses into a contrived climate horror show at some vague point in the future is that over time, people become inured to them. And switch off. Call it the broccoli effect.

The caption: Simon Stiel warned at a Smart Energy Council-hosted event that 'mega-droughts could make fresh fruit and veg a once-a-year treat'. Pictures iStock.News Corp.:

It turns out that climate science and global warming and all that jazz is just a huge broccoli joke to Jack ...

Earlier this week, Simon Stiell got to his feet at an event hosted by the Smart Energy Council to issue what he thought would be a dire warning.
“Mega-droughts (will make) fresh fruit and veg a once-a-year treat,” Stiell said, instantly bringing a gleam to the eye of vegetable-averse children everywhere. In terms of my dietary habits, I consider gnawing on a stub of broccoli a ­triennial event. Ratcheting up consumption to veggies once a year could cause some sort of tumultuous toxic gastrointestinal event. Better keep those white trousers hanging in the closet.
As an aside, I think there is a space in the crowded and agreeably lucrative nutritional book publishing market for my personal dietary recommendations to feature in a glossy book with the catchy title, “The hell with it. Let’s get some dirty bird on DoorDash again.” Follow me on Instagram for updates.
Stiell, who is executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, went on, declaring Australia could “in total face a $6.8 trillion GDP loss by 2050”. Australia’s GDP currently stands at $2.65 trillion. PwC is just one of many economic forecasters who put Australia’s GDP in 2050 somewhere around $4 trillion. So Stiell’s projections assume our GDP will more than double in the next 25 years, before the ­climate hammer comes down. ­According to Stiell, it’s boom time until eastern Australia glows ­orange and bursts into flame.

Cheap and easy jokes are the simplest way to deal with the implications of climate science, Sky News host Steve Price discusses the "ridiculous" claims made by the United Nations’ Simon Stiell. “A former politician from Grenada … who was set to meet Australia's Minister for Climate Change Chris Bowen today and who now works for the United Nations – of course – overnight made some of the most ridiculous claims about global warming and our role in it … that I have ever heard,” Mr Price said. “This bloke has declared Australia will let the world overheat, and fruit will be a once-a-year treat if the ALP does not lift its clean-energy ambitions. “The frightening thing is he will be telling an already unhinged minister, Chris Bowen, this garbage at that meeting today."

There's always hope, with new friendships forming ... As oceans warm, tropical fish are moving south. New friendships may be helping them survive.

We might lose a few island states along the way, and there are a few downers, As US climate data-gathering is gutted, Australian forecasting is now at real risk.

And the hysterics and alarmists refuse to give the reptiles a minute's rest, Historic ruling finds climate change 'imperils all forms of life' and puts laggard nations on notice.

Never mind, Jack knows the best way to advance proceedings is by way of ad hominem attack. 

Shoot the messenger for his silliness and there's no need to pay any attention to any of the messages:

Stiell is a Grenadian, hailing from an island nation at the southernmost point of the Windward Islands. 
It is home to 115,000 people, 98.5 per cent of whom are Christians. There is a relatively stable political environment of which he is an elected member. He’s an engineer by background, turned politician and property ­developer.
In Grenada, a kilogram of chicken bits and pieces costs $11. A one kilo bag of spuds cost less than $6, while a stubby of Red Stripe is a lipsmacking bargain at $3.65 and a pack of Marlboros will set you back a mere $8.50. Talk about your island paradises. Get me my travel agent on the phone right now.
I had the great pleasure of visiting Grenada many years ago as a tourist watching an Australian cricket tour of the West Indies in 1991. At the time, the smaller islands had endured deep economic turmoil almost two decades after Britain had signed onto Europe’s Common Market.
The European Economic Community rules required Britain to source its sugar crops from elsewhere, leaving sugar-reliant economies in Grenada, Barbados and St Kitts and Nevis without their big annual harvest paydays.

Cue a snap of the man who set Jack off,  UN climate chief Simon Stiell speaks during a Smart Energy Council event in Sydney. Picture: AFP

Jack likes to pretend that he's accepting of the science of climate change, and that it might need a little risk-management, but not too much ... don't want to frighten the hive mind horses ... might have a broccoli taste...

It took some time and great hardship to steer these tiny economies around from sugar to tourism and other more ingenious revenue-generating methods, such as economic citizenship and the establishment of some very liberal banking and corporate laws to fill their coffers.
It was a troubling time in the Caribbean, arguably a catastrophe, but one from which islands like Grenada have emerged with their British-styled political and legal systems intact and the depth and reach of grinding poverty experienced in the 1970s and ’80s much improved. The point to make is that human intervention and ingenuity saved the day.
The term alarmist is often thrown around when it comes to climate change but Stiell’s babble veers further into the fringes and on to downright catastrophism. It is unhelpful for those who accept the science of climate change at least to a point where it needs to be risk-managed.
For those who remain cynical, Stiell’s words were yet another dull exercise in promoting fear of a looming climate apocalypse. Yawn.

Jack then dragged out a very favourite old reptile piñata, one the pond hasn't seen been given a reptile beating for a considerable time... Professor Tim Flannery

Alas the pond has seen this reptile movie before ...

Alas, we have seen this movie before. We might recall that more than a decade ago, palaeontologist and mammalogist Tim Flannery uttered words paraphrased as “It might never rain again in eastern Australia”. To be fair to the former chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council, his exact words were: “Since 1998 particularly, we’ve seen just drought, drought, drought, and particularly regions like Sydney and the Warragamba catchment – if you look at the Warragamba catchment figures, since ’98, the water has been in virtual free fall, and they’ve got about two years of supply left, but something will need to change in order to see the catchment start accumulating water again.”
That was then and this now. As I look out from my office window, it is raining and the Warragamba Dam is at 97 per cent capacity. Less than a month ago with heavy rains in Sydney and flooding in the Upper Hunter, the dam overflowed. So frequent are these events that a project was put to government that would raise the dam’s wall by 14m, allowing Warragamba to hold an extra trillion ­litres of water and reduce flood damage in outer Sydney. The project was quietly shelved due to ­environmental concerns.
Since Flannery uttered those words 18 years ago, there have been four significant flooding events on the Northern Rivers leading to loss of life and cataclysmic property loss. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Meteorology’s July drought statement revealed below average rainfalls in large parts of Western Australia, western NSW, most of western and southern Queensland, southern Northern Territory, northern and parts of eastern South Australia, much of western Tasmania, and parts of west Gippsland in Victoria.
Droughts and flooding plains. Who’d have thought climate was so damned complicated?

At this point Jack showed enormous restraint in not making it entirely clear that his climate science was based entirely on a poem by Dorothea Mackellar.

That's rare discretion and restraint in reptile la la land ...

There was a link at the end of that sentence*, but it wasn't to anything that showed Jack had evolved in his understanding of climate science and the role that global warming might play in the matter of rain and floods ...an understanding that has improved since Flannery's time.

For that better to head off to the CSIRO ... Understanding the causes and impacts of flooding.

The specific contribution of climate change to such individual events is difficult to assess
We know that the Earth has warmed by 1.09 °C since 1850-1900, mostly due to human activities that have increased greenhouse gases. Warmer oceans and higher sea surface temperatures tend to increase the amount of moisture that gets transported from the ocean to the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and can increase the intensity of extreme rainfall events. Hourly extreme rainfall intensities increased by 10–20 per cent in many Australian locations between 1966–1989 and 1990–2013. Daily rainfall associated with thunderstorms increased 13-24 per cent from 1979 to 2016, particularly in northern Australia.
Understanding the extent to which climate change has contributed to individual extreme events is less clear. This is because climate change is superimposed upon large natural climate variability.
Assessing the extent to which climate change and natural climate variability play a role in extreme events can now be done using climate models. This is otherwise known as “event attribution”. Various Australian attribution studies have been published for extreme temperature events, extreme rainfall events and extreme fire events . An event attribution analysis for the February-March 2022 flood event has not yet been performed.
It is expected that long-term climate change will result in greater climate variability with more intense extreme events than in the past
CSIRO research shows that Australia is likely to become warmer over the coming decades, with a reduction in average annual rainfall in the south and east. In contrast, average annual rainfall projections for northern Australia are uncertain.
As the climate warms, heavy rainfall events are expected to continue to become more intense. For example, the intensity of daily rainfall with a one-in-20 year average recurrence may increase 4-10 per cent by 2050 for a low emission scenario and 8-20 per cent by 2050 for a high emission scenario.
CSIRO research has shown a direct relationship between increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and an increase in strong El Nino and La Nina events.
Some parts of Australia will be more vulnerable to flood risk
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the projected increase in heavy rainfall will increase flood risk in cities, built-up urban areas, and small catchments, where extreme rainfall over hours to a day can quickly become flash floods. It's more complex in rural areas and for larger river basins, where floods are driven by multi-day rainfall events and by the preceding soil moisture conditions.

Those bloody alarmists, they do their very best to get you coming and going, but Jack sailed on serenely oblivious and defiant in the matter of vegetables, because it's all a joke, right ... all those floods are a bloody big laugh ...

Surely, the argument for climate change advocates to make is not one that seeks to instil fear. The problem with providing persistent glimpses into a contrived horror show at some vague point in the future is that over time, people become inured to them and simply switch off. On this occasion, the prospect of a dystopian broccoli-less future doesn’t add to a sense of dread. It’s something I look forward to.

(* the link? As with every reptile link, it was just another way to stay inside the hive mind).

And so to wrap up with this day's infallible Pope, on a matter relevant to the pond's recent bruising by a bot ...

A chance for the bot to get agitated about Snappy Tom's offering? With bonus refreshments to give the bot new challenges ...

 

The pond was mildly nauseated by the smug, condescending self-congratulatory tone of these closing lines in Media Watch's story, Photographing famine.

So consequential, the work of these photographers, on Saturday the Israeli military announced it would allow the resumption of air drops of food and reestablish safe routes for the deployment of aid convoys into the strip.  
Evidence the right image at the right time can move the world.

Actually the air drops are a pathetically minuscule bit of token bandaidism, and ditto the small number of trucks currently rolling out.

This situation has been developing for months, and suddenly it takes snaps of kids now well into starvation for the Australian media to take notice? (and even then not to take notice, in the case of the lizard Oz).

Others didn't need a few snaps as a reminder. Bernie Sanders was tweeting back in April ...

And he was speechifying on 8th May ...

WASHINGTON, May 8 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today gave remarks on the Senate floor marking 68 days since Israel allowed humanitarian aid into Gaza and calling on the U.S. to end its complicity in the destruction of the Palestinian people. 
M. President, I want to say a few words about an issue that people all over the world are thinking about – are appalled by – but for some strange reason gets very little discussion here in the nation’s capital or in the halls of Congress. And that is the horrific humanitarian disaster that is unfolding in Gaza. 
Today marks 68 days and counting since ANY humanitarian aid was allowed into Gaza. For more than nine weeks, Israel has blocked all supplies: no food, no water, no medicine, and no fuel. 
Hundreds of truckloads of lifesaving supplies are waiting to enter Gaza, sitting just across the border, but are denied entry by Israeli authorities. 
There is no ambiguity here: Netanyahu’s extremist government talks openly about using humanitarian aid as a weapon. Defense Minister Israel Katz said “Israel’s policy is clear: no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers.” 
M. President, starving children to death as a weapon of war is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, the Foreign Assistance Act, and basic human decency. Civilized people do not starve children to death. 
What is going on in Gaza is a war crime, committed openly and in broad daylight, and continuing every single day. 
M. President, there are 2.2 million people who live in Gaza. Today, these people are trapped. The borders are sealed. And Israel has pushed the population into an ever-smaller area. 
With Israel having cut off all aid, what we are seeing now is a slow, brutal process of mass starvation and death by the denial of basic necessities. This is methodical, it is intentional, it is the stated policy of the Netanyahu government. 
Without fuel, there is no ability to pump fresh water, leaving people increasingly desperate, unable to find clean water to drink, wash with, or cook properly. Disease is once again spreading in Gaza. 
Most of the bakeries in Gaza have now shut down, having run out of fuel and flour. The few remaining community kitchens are also shutting down. Most people are now surviving on scarce canned goods, often a single can of beans or some lentils, shared between a family once a day. 
The UN reports that more than 2 million people out of a population of 2.2 million face severe food shortages. 
The starvation hits children hardest. At least 65,000 children now show symptoms of malnutrition, and dozens have already starved to death. 
Malnutrition rates increased 80 percent in March, the last month for which data is available, after Netanyahu began the siege, but the situation has severely deteriorated since then. 

And so on, and here we are at the end of July and Media Watch thinks a few snaps will fix things?

Perhaps too much time following the reptiles and not enough time in the real world?

It's beyond the valley of the deeply pathetic.

But the pond digresses. 

This is the third instalment in the pond's attempt to discover what set the Google bot off, and made it issue demands about age verification or else.

Thus far the pond has reclaimed nattering "Ned" and the prattling Polonius from the bot ban, but the third offering, Snappy Tom, will only be interesting to completists.

The pond only featured Snappy Tom as an interruption because nattering "Ned", scribbling about child care, had been even more tiresome than Dame Groan, and that's saying something.

The trouble with Snappy Tom is that his Trumpish offering of canned tuna on the weekend is now well past its use by date.

The frenetic Commander in Cheat has managed to garner all kinds of headlines since then (and already that nickname feels dated President Trump's New 3-Word Nickname Is Going Viral). 

The news about King Donald cheating at golf is about as fresh and revelatory as news that he's a fraud, a grifter and a snake oil salesman of the first water.

King Donald merely has to open his mouth to yap before a new headline joins the world ...

The upside is that all this provides a relentless stream of 'toons and columns ...Trump's mental decline is on vivid display as he rages about Epstein ...

It was nice of Donald Trump to travel to Scotland and show our European allies firsthand that the United States is led by a self-absorbed and deeply weird man in obvious mental decline.
Over the span of a weekend, the U.S. president’s addled brain raced about like a dull-witted Labrador attempting to outsmart squirrels. He went on lengthy diatribes about windmills. He ranted about the ungratefulness of starving children. He forayed into nonsensical conspiracy theories regarding the Jeffrey Epstein scandal consuming his administration, while laughably saying upon arriving in Scotland on July 25: “I’m not focused on conspiracy theories.”
Trump's head, based on his overseas babbling, is 90% conspiracy theories and 10% brain cells.
Coverage of Trump's Scotland trip doesn't show the extent of his rambling
The trip was largely a taxpayer-funded chance for the grifter in chief to promote his Scottish golf properties, which in the realm of “things Trump can do that no other president would ever get away with” barely registers as a blip.
It was also a chance for him to talk “deals” with the European Union and the United Kingdom, with a “deal” being something resulting in trade tariffs that will negatively impact American consumers.
Or as Trump likes to call it, “Winning.”
News coverage tends to trim Trump’s voluminous prattling into digestible sound bites that sound vaguely sane. But if we care about a president’s lack of mental acuity – and I’ve been told by many that we do – it’s worth sticking your head in the high-pressure stream of nonsense that shoots out every time Trump opens his face hole.
Trump shows he's laser-focused on the scourge of windmills
On July 25, Trump deplaned in Scotland and immediately showed reporters he was armed with weapons-grade non sequiturs.
“This immigration is killing Europe,” he said, racistly. “And the other thing, stop the windmills killing the beauty of your countries.”
Two days later, he sat with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, who looked like she would love to be elsewhere, and uncorked this: “And the other thing I say to Europe, we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States, they’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains. And I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains, beautiful areas of the United States, and you look up and you see windmills all over the place, it’s a horrible thing. It's the most expensive form of energy; it’s no good. They’re made in China, almost all of them. When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn them off, you can’t bury them, they won't let you. But the propellers, the props, because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land, that’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them because the fiber doesn’t go well with the land; in other words, if you bury it, it will harm our soil. The whole thing is a con job.”
OK. That was a thing nobody asked for. It’s also filled with lies – wind isn’t the most expensive form of energy, and windmills last far longer than eight years. But who would expect honesty from someone rambling like that?

And so on and on, and so much material. He's not the best show runner in terms of quantity, but he's up there in terms of quantity.

But while acknowledging that everything Snappy Tom had to say is now pretty irrelevant or redundant, the pond didn't want the bot to win.

It turned out that the pond didn't really need Snappy Tom talking about King Donald to do a segue to those yarns, but hear him out, because he's feeling a trifle despondent...

The pond included a cartoon and a naughty word that might have got the pond into bot trouble:

Oh, is that a hint of WSJ sauciness and p***ing (*) on the trousers that the pond hears in the header? 

US President’s troubles come cheap but will leave expensive, The White House is brewing up a perfect storm that could hurt investors and savers in friendly nations like Australia.

The caption: US President Donald Trump arrives to speak at an AI summit in Washington. Picture: Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP Photo

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

(* the pond doesn't want Snappy Tom to suffer from the pond's verbal exuberance, it was just a harmless reference to a cartoon about the WSJ showing the actual activity)

The reptiles clocked snappy Tom as a seven minute read and he didn't seem happy:

It has been a fevered six months since Donald J. Trump took the oath of office at the Capitol in Washington. Like a true Meta bro, the US President (jersey numbers 45 and 47) has moved fast and broken things, albeit some of which were fragile to begin with. Trust in financial systems. Rules-based orders. Global agreements. Decorum. His policy frenzy eclipses whatever writer Philip Roth might have had in mind when he conceived the notion of the “indigenous American berserk”.
Shape-shifting tariffs may be an act of self-harm but they hurt global trade and growth. After being smacked with a 25 per cent tariff, Tokyo this week did a deal with the US. Japan opened up its economy to American rice and cars, and the impost on Japanese imports was cut to 15 per cent.
The Albanese government, too, is angling for relief and on Thursday announced the removal of a ban on imported US beef from cattle reared in Canada and Mexico. Washington claimed the win gleefully; Labor has other fish to fry.

Now there's an excuse for a Sunday 'toon (now Wednesday of course):

Tom also went the Powell angle:

Trump’s fiscal foolhardiness taunts creditors and will exact a huge debt-servicing burden on young Americans. The independent Congressional Budget Office this week reported the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s tax cuts and spending would add $US3.4 trillion ($5.2 trillion) to the US deficit across 10 years.
The White House also is gunning for US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell; the savagery, recklessness and seeming randomness is sending a chill through financial markets and the ranks of the world’s central bankers. What’s motivating it? “I can’t speak for what goes through Mr Trump’s mind,” Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock says. “I’m not sure anyone can.”

For some reason the reptiles offered a snap of Bullock rather than Powell, perhaps a reward for her line about not being able to penetrate a fog, RBA Governor Michele Bullock at the Anika Foundation lunch in Sydney. Picture: Gaye Gerard / NewsWire

Snappy Tom got stuck into the naked corruption:

Trump’s attention-seeking, narcissism and lust for dominance of the attention economy are a given. While many hope things will settle down at some point, it’s Trump’s ease of using power that has astonished DC’s political class.
According to the US Federal Register, Trump has signed 171 executive orders in his second term; he signed 220 of these presidential actions (which direct federal agencies on how to act) during the four years of his first administration. In total (391), that’s already more than two-term presidents Barack Obama (277), George W. Bush (291) and Bill Clinton (364) and Ronald Reagan (381).
Trump’s orders are all over the shop, from TikTok enforcement to nukes, but their titles pop with telltale MAGA branding: “restoring”, “unleashing”, “empowering”, “fighting” and “protecting”.
April’s Liberation Day tariffs rocked financial markets for a time, as well as central banks. Then Trump wobbled, extending timelines by 90 days for implementation. A British financial pundit alleged “Trump Always Chickens Out”. TACO stuck as a trading strategy for the money movers.
Westpac chief economist Luci Ellis wonders whether a better framing would be Trump Ambit Claims Often, “a description of a negotiating strategy rather than the suggestion of a character flaw”.

Oh come on Luci, do better to earn your snap, Westpac chief economist Luci Ellis. Picture: Jane Dempster / The Australian

Snappy Tom kept worrying about the economy ...

In a note, Ellis says the tariffs are as much about showing the world who is boss – or, as the White House itself put it, “Keeping America in the Driver’s Seat” – as about economic policy goals.
“The tariffs are still an act of inflationary self-harm, so the default presumption should be that re-escalations are negotiating tactics, not the likely end state,” she says.
The former RBA assistant governor believes “we are more in the realm of psychology than economics and must proceed accordingly”. “A lot will depend on other governments striking the right balance between belligerence and obsequiousness,” she says.
This week the International Monetary Fund warned in its annual External Sector Report that tariffs were not the answer to fixing America’s external accounts. The problem was homegrown: Washington’s loose budgets, its billowing deficits and debt.
In the short term, the IMF report says, “escalation of the trade war would have significant macroeconomic effects”, with reduced global demand and further inflationary pressures through rising import prices. Further geopolitical tensions also could trigger shifts in the international monetary system, which in turn could undermine financial stability.
Investors also may lose confidence in the US dollar, which the. IMF says has been the backbone of the global system over the past 80 years, “despite momentous changes such as the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1973, the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the creation of the euro in 1999”.
That dominance means the US has been able to borrow more and at a lower cost and extract big returns (which the IMF calls “exorbitant privilege”); but it also has exposed the nation to risk, with the US offering insurance against shocks to the rest of the world (or an “exorbitant duty”). The privilege has softened and investors are reassessing their dollar exposure.

Come on Snappy Tom, you can't use the economy as a distraction. Remember the main game:

Snappy Tom insisted on worrying about the big bust:

IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas says tariffs will reduce savings and investment in the tariffing country, and neither reduces US excessive external deficits or China’s super-sized surpluses. “A major risk for the global economy is that countries will instead respond to rising imbalances by further raising trade barriers, leading to increased geoeconomic fragmentation,” Gourinchas says. “And while the impact on global imbalances will remain limited, the harm to the global economy will be long-lasting.”
When the RBA kept the cash rate steady in July, it noted the probability of “severe downside scenarios” for our growth and employment that staff had war-gamed looked to have declined. Bond and equity markets had settled, signalling “the most extreme outcomes for US tariffs were likely to be avoided”.
Still, the July board minutes noted “the future state of US trade and other policies was unpredictable and geopolitical tensions remained acute”, and three of nine board members voted for a rate cut because of subdued local growth and a likely slowing abroad.
More worrying for financial stability is the MAGA assault on Powell. Trump called the world’s most powerful central banker a “numbskull” and “Too Late”, for failing to cut the federal funds rate; it is now 4.25 to 4.5 per cent, where it has been since December.

At last a snap of Jerome, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell. Picture: Mark Schiefelbein / AP Photo

To be fair - the pond is feeling incredibly fair this day - Snappy Tom was probably onto something by refusing to take the bait. 

After all, as Glasser noted, the current scandal has been hiding in plain sight for many years. She wrote:

...On the surface, it’s a classic Washington gotcha. No surprise that there have been lots of predictably sanctimonious allusions to Howard Baker’s most quotable Watergate moment; these political feeding frenzies almost invariably come down to Baker’s question of what did the President know and when did he know it. But this is Trump we’re talking about, and this scandal, I regret to inform you, is not on the level. In fact, we’ve known for years about Trump’s sleazy dealings with Epstein—one particularly awful aspect of this particularly awful story is having to watch, over and over again, that 1992 video of the two of them partying, which is recirculated online with each incremental new development. In Trump’s first term, his appointee as head of the Labor Department, Alex Acosta, resigned after controversy over his role as a former Florida prosecutor in giving Epstein a sweetheart plea deal. And remember when Trump said of Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, “I just wish her well”? Here we are five years later, and Todd Blanche, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General and former personal lawyer, travelled to interview Maxwell in a federal courthouse in Florida on Thursday, supposedly in search of additional evidence. Hmm...
The scandal, then, is not the revelation that Trump was friends with a sexual monster who exploited underage women, since it is not a revelation. Nor is it that the President lied to the American public, something he does with remarkable frequency. No, the novelty here is that millions of Americans who knew that Trump was friends with such a horrid man and voted for him anyway now appear to have decided that, in a choice between Trump and a favorite conspiracy theory, they may just stick with the conspiracy theory. (this in a now dated New Yorker piece, here, archive link here).

Tom stayed true to Jerome and the economy:

After the Federal Open Market Committee held rates in June, Powell said near-term measures of inflation expectations had moved up in recent months and identified tariffs as the “driving factor”. He warned increases in tariffs were “likely to push up prices and weigh on economic activity”.
Trump insists the Fed’s policy rate should be “at least” three percentage points lower. Last week he canvassed congressional Republicans about whether to fire Powell.
The Wall Street Journal reported US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent advised his boss not to sack Powell. Bessent now declares the entire monetary institution should be formally examined.
“There was fearmongering over tariffs and thus far we have seen very little if any inflation,” he told CNBC. “We have had great inflation numbers, so I think this idea of them not being able to break out of a certain mindset – you know, all these PhDs over there, I don’t know what they do.”
It was yet another attack on experts. Jason Furman, a former chief economic adviser to Obama, argues firing Powell “would unleash a massive amount of uncertainty, litigation and market turmoil”. The Harvard professor says when central banks are protected from political interference, they deliver lower and more stable inflation without job losses.
“Fears about the Fed’s independence would send markets into a tizzy with more risk and higher expected inflation almost certainly driving up longer-term interest rates,” Furman wrote last week in The New York Times.
On Thursday, Bullock voiced support for Powell. “You would have to say that the Fed is doing what it is supposed to be doing, which is focusing on the economy and employment,” the RBA chief told an Anika Foundation lunch. “They are not getting drawn into debate. Central bank independence is very important. Certainly, what’s going on in the United States is challenging that.”

(The pond will allow this distracting detou, as it seems harmless enough and not likely to excite the bot)

Dammit, the pond gave him every chance, but snappy Tom missed the best joke, as transcribed by The Bulwark ... a real-time fact-check (you have to watch the vision to see the Powell head-shaking)

Trump: “It looks like it’s about $3.1 billion. It went up a little bit…The $2.7 is now $3.1.”
Powell: “I’m not aware of that.”
Trump: “It just came out.”
Powell: “This came from us?”
Trump: “Yes.”
Powell: “You are including the Martin renovation. You just added in a third building.”
Trump: “It’s a building that's being built.”
Powell: “No, it was built five years ago.”

(See what the pond means about being dated? That now reads like an antiquated antique item down there with antimacassars and the aspidistra on the what not - yes, the pond once lived in a house with such a thing).

Snappy Tom kept on with his Chicken Little impression, though fair dibs, the sky might soon be falling:

The biggest long-term worry is the US budget’s trajectory after congress passed the OBBB Act. Even before this fiscal abomination is factored in, the CBO estimated federal public debt, now equal to the size of the US economy, would rise to 156 per cent of GDP over the next three decades.
Former Clinton administration Treasury chiefs Bob Rubin and Larry Summers argue fighting the Fed, busting the budget and a trade war will set the US on a road to ruin. Before Trump’s budget bill was passed, they warned the fiscal trajectory would lead to higher interest rates and capital costs, reduced business confidence, crowding out of private investment and derail America’s ability to cash in on the AI revolution.
Annual US deficits, which add to the stock of public debt, are rising from 5 per cent to 7 per cent of GDP in coming years. Washington is spending more on interest payments than defence. For perspective, Canberra’s expected $42bn underlying cash deficit this year is 1.5 per cent of GDP.
Harvard’s Greg Mankiw says there are only five ways to stop this upward trajectory in debt to income: extraordinary economic growth (he says, don’t bet on it); government default (Trump has expanded the range of policy possibilities); large-scale money creation (if Trump has his way with the Fed); substantial cuts in government spending (out of the question); and large tax increases (most likely in the long run).
“If one day the bond vigilantes wake up and start viewing the United States as a large version of Greece or Argentina, they will stop buying US debt at normal rates of interest. Congress will have no choice but to face the music, regardless of the political consequences,” the one-time council of economic advisers chief under Bush 43 said in a speech this month honouring Reagan-era deficit hawk Martin Feldstein.
According to Mankiw, the bond vigilantes may strike sooner rather than later.
Cracks are developing in the fiscal foundations, such as Moody’s downgrading of US government debt below AAA status. None of the major credit agencies gives US debt its top rating.
Australia may be one of the few countries with a gold star from credit watchers, but fiscal perils lurk for a nation with a federal deficit default setting. Then there’s the constant “friendly fire” from the White House and the likelihood of further trade and defence shakedowns, higher global borrowing rates and other shocks.
A perfect storm is brewing and it could sink the fortunes of many: countries, private investors, savers and retirees. Australians are not immune. As Richard Ford wrote in his story collection Rock Springs (1987), “Trouble comes cheap and leaves expensive.”
Or maybe Trouble just hangs around for a while ...

The trouble with all this is that King Donald is like a relentless threshing machine.

Snappy Tom getting all angsty is just a dime a dozen stuff.

For example, just yesterday Politico was running this story, Trump got his tariff hike. The rest remains murky.He is taking a victory lap on his trade agenda after reaching deals with the EU and Japan, but it’s not clear how much countries have agreed to. (*archive link)

And so on and it's all a murky mess, with new deals and new angles unfolding each day, of the kind a failed New York casino and real estate developer might do to create an image of looking busy.

After the pond finished with Snappy Tom, there followed a few distractions which the pond will allow because they seem harmless enough and unlikely to scare a bot. 

First came a few toons...

Then a joke

Welcome to Scotland, bonnie lad...

A poem for MAGAts to recite, full of loss and yearning. Take it away, Robbie ...

O how can I be blythe and glad,
Or how can I gang brisk and braw,
When the bonnie lad that I loe best,
Is o'er the hills and far awa.

But of course the Commander of Golfing Cheats is now back, far away from the bonnie protesting Scots.

The flim-flam man wins again.

And so to the pond's conclusion to this segment ... a reminder of why the pond refuses to watch CNN, for fear it might encounter another Jennings ... 

Why is it that in and outside the fifth form, that name is always a problem?

(At this point the pond included a clip which surely caused no bot harm, though the long absent lord knows that children should be sheltered from the man. Of course it's dated, there have been days of jokes since ...)

 

 And if none of these have caused bot alarms, on to the final offering tomorrow at 4.30 pm, featuring a couple of other distractions the pond offered to make the lizard Oz swill more digestible. Same bat - or should that be bot? - channel