In which the bromancer goes on the warpath (again) and Major Mitchell gasses the country from the nineteenth hole ...

 

Appalling really - not the deed but the reptiles dragging Adolf into it by headlining this quote ‘Kristallnacht in Melbourne'.

Whatever it was, it wasn't Kristallnacht. It also ain't no Gaza ethnic cleansing ... but naturally the reptiles were all in on the matter this day ...

The immortal Rowe had thoughts on the matter, but the pond left this treat to the end. There has to be some sort of reward for wading through the usual reptile morass and fog of words.

What else?

Well over on the extreme far right Albo attempted to appease the reptiles by heading behind the paywall to give succour to the reptiles' endless appetite for shekels, but they couldn't be bothered even finding a thumb photo for his piece ...

It was a minor humiliation, but surely intended as a slight.

Sad, as if you can ever appease the hive mind by feeding them a little meat...

Why Labor is ready to build on John Curtin’s ambition
Robert Menzies had said because Britain was at war with Germany, Australia was also at war. Under Labor, Curtin said Australia was at war ‘because our vital interests are imperilled’.
By Anthony Albanese

It didn't work - the tepid lesser Leak depicted him as a turtle and at the mention of Curtin, the bromancer went into his usual frenzy:

The header: Washington will not be impressed by Anthony Albanese’s Curtin call ... but Beijing will lap it up, Is Anthony Albanese actually trying, intentionally, for reasons best known to himself, to diminish, if not undermine, the US-Australia alliance?
The caption for the reptile rule of always beginning with a snap that shows the pollie in a most unflattering pose: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese implying greater Australian strategic distance from America will be welcomed in Beijing. Picture: Jane Dempster/The Australian
The magickal command: This article contains features which are only available in the web version,Take me there

Perhaps sensing that his war with China by Xmas might be slipping away, the bro went full Henry, or at least full Quad rant by reliving Curtin for a full horrified four minutes ...

Is Anthony Albanese actually trying, intentionally, for reasons best known to himself, to diminish, if not undermine, the US-Australia alliance?
How else to explain his bizarre “look away from America” speech about John Curtin, and the lesson for contemporary Australia to keep its distance from the US?
What byzantine thought processes in the PM’s office produced this astonishingly ahistorical, if not slightly dotty, speech about Curtin, misinterpreting the wartime leader – who placed all Australian troops under the command of US General Douglas MacArthur, who wanted to make Australia “a second Britannia in the Antipodes”, who in his own words feared “the teeming millions of coloured races” to Australia’s north and who therefore argued for re-establishing imperial defence centred on Britain once the war ended – into a modern identity politics kumbaya Asianist?

The pond was forced to rush off to a dictionary to work out what that might actually mean, and came across this ...

Asianism is a modern coinage referring to the rhetorical practice of certain Greek and Latin orators whose styles were designated by ancient critics as Asian (Asianus, Asiaticus, Ἀσιανός)—the “Asia” in question being the Republican Roman province. Asian eloquence was often contrasted unfavorably to a corresponding Attic style (Atticus, Ἀττικός), which was modelled on the prose of classical Athenian writers (a practice now known as Atticism). This opposition between Asian and Attic styles is first attested in Roman oratorical circles during the mid-1st century bce and was subsequently adopted by Greek critics in Augustan Rome, but seems to have fallen out of fashion by the reign of Tiberius. While Attic remains a general stylistic ideal in the more broadly conceived classicism of Imperial Greek literature, the term Asian disappears as a stylistic label. In a related, but separate development, from the late 1st century ce onwards, Greek literary writers increasingly adhered to a linguistic, rather than stylistic, variety of Atticism, which concentrated on reproducing the ancient Attic dialect used by Athenian authors of the 5th and 4th centuries bce. This Atticism was opposed, not to anything Asian, but to the literary koinê of the Hellenistic and early Imperial era.

Alternatively ...

A scholar involved in Asian studies; in particular, an anthropologist or linguist who focuses on Asia.

And so that fetid form of idle abuse, the mindlessly moronic flourish about modern identity politics kumbaya Asianist, didn't make any sense, save to show off the bromancer's tendency to hysteria and verbal diarrhoea. 

It did at least allow the pond the chance to have an Our Henry moment, as the bromancer raged on ...

Of course, it’s not the misrepresentation of Curtin’s historical record in this speech that is so perplexing. It’s the dangerous rhetorical and political purposes to which Albanese seeks to put this misinterpretation that is worrying. Who on earth is Albanese messaging in this speech? Because it implies greater Australian strategic distance from America, it will be welcomed in Beijing. But the Prime Minister is surely overdoing things here. There’s already been enough sucking up to Beijing to ensure a favourable reception in his forthcoming extended trip to China.

How the reptiles resent this China trip, how they'd love to see Albo tug the forelock, bend the knee, kiss the ring, and still with a goodly chance of humiliation meted out by the Cantoloupe Caligula, perhaps on the basis that he can't stand Austrians.

At this point the reptiles flung  in an AV distraction, Emergency Management Minister Kristy McBain discusses Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visiting China in the coming week. Prime Minister Albanese has been criticised for his planned visit to China, before meeting face-to-face with US President Donald Trump. “We’ve got a steady relationship with China now,” Ms McBain told Sky News Australia. “We’ve had a calibrated and open communication with them over the last three years. “As a country, we’re working really hard with all of our trading partners to ensure that we’re getting good deals for our exporters … so that we can broaden out our trade, our relationships with a range of countries. “I think the prime minister has been clear he’s had three telephone conversations with Donald Trump, each of them have been warm and friendly. “I’m sure that visit will be planned and sorted out as soon as possible.”

Not content with the bland assurances offered in that caption, the bromancer stayed all in ...

What does the speech say to Washington? That Australia knows better than the Americans? Surely that’s the implication of the tired, tedious, droolingly unspecific tacit call for greater independence within the alliance. Greater independence and self-reliance would obviously require a vastly increased defence budget. What price logic in this speech?
It’s worth noting that as the PM prepares for his fourth meeting with Xi Jinping but apparently won’t go to Washington to meet Donald Trump, he’s now making strategic speeches more welcome in Beijing than in Washington.
Back to Curtin. In the 1930s, a decade of comprehensive bipartisan defence failure by Australia, which led to the nation being wholly unprepared for World War II, Curtin at least notionally supported defence self-reliance.
Albanese would say he promotes Australian defence self-reliance too, and also supports the US alliance. But here’s the most basic of the countless contradictions. You cannot do defence self-reliance while failing to produce a formidable Australian Defence Force. And you can’t have a formidable ADF with our current pathetic defence budget.
Defence expenditure was 2 per cent of GDP when Albanese came to office, it’s 2.05 per cent of GDP now. The dollar increase in the defence budget is a result mainly of inflation and population growth. The real increase in defence spending is minuscule.
The Albanese government has embarked on a program to acquire nuclear submarines, which eats up vast amounts of money without substantially increasing defence spending. As a result we are weaker militarily now than when Albanese was elected. That’s not independence or self-reliance, it’s national irresponsibility of the kind Curtin fought against. Washington has noticed that Albanese is not remotely funding even the capabilities identified as urgent in his government’s own Defence Strategic Review.

It's possible to sympathise. How can a self-appointed Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches bung on a war with China by Xmas without the bloody kit!

Cue a snap featuring a penetratingly deep caption, Prime Minister John Curtin led the country through most of World War II.

The bro was inconsolable as he sauntered through long ago times ...

The historical interpretations and weight given to various different episodes in Albanese’s speech are a kind of undergraduate level partisan myth-making that distorts Curtin into an unrecognisable caricature born out of a wilful misinterpretation of a single episode.
Famously, Britain’s Winston Churchill wanted Australian troops sent to Burma. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t oppose Churchill. Curtin rightly overruled Churchill and brought the troops back to Australia. Robert Menzies would have made the same decision.
Two of the three military chiefs of staff in Australia at that time were British officers on loan. With their chairman, Vernon Sturdee, they unanimously urged Curtin to bring the Australian troops home. Jeffrey Grey, in his definitive military history of Australia, makes clear Churchill was high-handed and dishonest with Curtin, as he had been with Menzies over the deployment of Australian troops to Greece.
Curtin deserves credit for his leadership in this episode and throughout the war. But for Albanese to single out this one case of Australia disagreeing with Britain and the US, as Menzies himself had often done, as the high point of Curtin’s whole career, and the main strategic lesson to take from his wartime prime ministership, is bizarre and historically obtuse, if not downright dishonest.

The next caption astonishingly repeated a slur on the British bulldog, Winston Churchill was high-handed and dishonest with Curtin. Picture: Getty Images

Say what? Once upon a time the mere mention of Winnie was peak praise, as long ago, way back in January 2003, the bromancer was berated in Bush Churchillian? About as much as Mr Ed.

Truth will be the first casualty in the coming war, as it always is, with the corpse of commonsense a close second: "As we approach war with Iraq, it's becoming obvious that George W. Bush is really a modern Winston Churchill," gushed Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian last Thursday.
This is a mighty leap. Before becoming prime minister, Churchill had escaped from a Boer POW camp, had ridden in the British army's last cavalry charge at Omdurman, had sat in the House of Commons for both the Conservative and Liberal parties, been First Lord of the Admiralty at the outbreak of World War I, had bungled the Gallipoli campaign, had commanded an infantry battalion in the trenches of France, had been home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer, had broken a general strike, had advised a king on his abdication, had won respect as a landscape painter and written profoundly literate works of British and American history.
Bush, by contrast, has run a plodding oil exploration company and a Texas baseball team, the Vietnam War somehow taking place without him. He was bulldozed into the White House by his father's former courtiers and a few hundred hanging chads scraped together by his brother Jeb, the Governor of Florida.
Sheridan, starry-eyed, was writing fresh from an audience with Dr Henry Kissinger, who has been offering his invaluable views around Sydney this week. All off the record, of course, but the Oz's foreign affairs pundit felt able to vouchsafe that "he is a wholehearted supporter of action against Iraq".
Such a surprise. But I was pleased to hear it, for ever since Vietnam I have found it unerringly useful to discover what the good doctor thinks on any international crisis and then to take exactly the opposite view.

Splendid advice, because the pond has never read a bromancer column without taking exactly the opposite view, especially as the valiant armchair warrior seems never to have found a war he didn't like.

Here, have a celebratory Broelman ...

Now on with relitigating WWII, and claiming Curtin for the bromancer cause:

Curtin moved mountains to keep first Britain, then America, involved in Australian security. Indeed Curtin said Australia had to be “harnessed” to other nations, meaning Britain and the US.
In fact, Curtin reversed Labor policy of appointing an Australian-born governor-general to appoint instead a British royal, substantially in the hope this would lead to Britain stationing troops in Australia. Within Labor, Curtin stared down the pacifists and isolationists to produce military and alliance capability. Albanese should try channelling that Curtin.
Curtin understood profoundly something that seems to have passed Albanese by, that Australia’s strategic circumstances are such that its survival as an independent, sovereign nation was not guaranteed by history.
Therefore Australia needed formidable military capability and dynamic, committed alliances with its closest political, ethical and strategic partners, the US and Britain. Of course, it also needed the best Asia policy it could manage.
Far from bravely promoting the national interest in the face of Anglo-American bullying, the undergraduate myth at the heart of so much Labor posturing, Albanese seems to have lost sight of what our enduring national interests at play here are.

Our enduring national interest? By golly if Ukraine is any guide, we're in lots of bother.

See Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, The U.S. Is Switching Sides, Donald Trump is giving Vladimir Putin every incentive to keep killing Ukrainians. (*archive link)

The American president wrote, “Vladimir, STOP!” on his Truth Social account in April, but the Russian president did not halt his offensive in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian president called for an unconditional cease-fire in May, but the Russians did not agree to stop attacking Ukrainian civilians from the air. Donald Trump repeatedly promised, during his campaign, that he would end the war “in one day,” but the war is not over. He spoke to Vladimir Putin yesterday, and Putin responded with more drones and missiles than ever before. This morning, parts of Kyiv are burning.
The invasion of Ukraine does not merely continue. It accelerates. Almost every night, the Russians destroy more of Ukraine from the air: apartment buildings, factories, infrastructure, and people. On the ground, Ukraine’s top commander has said that the Russians are preparing a new summer offensive, with 695,000 troops spread across the front line.
Russian soldiers also continue to be wounded or killed at extraordinary rates, with between 35,000 and 45,000 casualties every month, while billions of dollars’ worth of Russian equipment are destroyed every week by Ukrainian drones. The Russian economy suffers from high inflation and is heading for a recession. But Putin is not looking for a cease-fire, and he does not want to negotiate. Why? Because he believes that he can win. Thanks to the actions of the U.S. government, he still thinks that he can conquer all of Ukraine.
Putin sees what everyone else sees: Slowly, the U.S. is switching sides. True, Trump occasionally berates Putin, or makes sympathetic noises toward Ukrainians, as he did last week when he seemed to express interest in a Ukrainian journalist who said that her husband was in the military. Trump also appeared to enjoy being flattered at the NATO summit, where European leaders made a decision, hailed as historic, to further raise defense spending. But thanks to quieter decisions by members of his own administration, people whom he has appointed, the American realignment with Russia and against Ukraine and Europe is gathering pace—not merely in rhetoric but in reality.

And so on and on and on...

Our enduring national interest is with a bunch of grifters, liars and drunks? With the lying nakedly obvious and immediately contradicted ...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing intense scrutiny after the Pentagon delayed a shipment of weapons bound for Ukraine. The official reason for the delay was concern over low stockpiles, but an analysis by senior military officials found that the shipment would not jeopardize military supplies.
The decision to halt the shipment was made earlier this week, with Hegseth issuing a memo ordering a review of stockpiled munitions. The Ukraine shipment could be delayed until the review has been completed, two defense officials and two congressional officials told NBC. If stockpiles are low or the weapons are needed elsewhere, the shipment could be delayed even further.
Despite this rationale, Hegseth’s decision came as a surprise to the State Department and members of Congress, as well as officials in Ukraine and other European allies. (here)

As the pond was distracted, the reptiles slipped in a pontificating prof., University of California Professor of Political Science Louis DeSipio discusses the ongoing drama of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese being unable to secure a meeting with US President Donald Trump. “The United States recognises the importance of the relationship with Australia particularly because of our joint concerns about a Chinese expansion,” Mr DeSipio told Sky News Australia. “The Trump administration ... does want to reach out and have a conversation. “That hasn’t happened yet, but I suspect it will pretty soon because the Trump administration knows how to stage meetings in the Oval Office when it needs to.”

The long absent lord help comrade Albo if a staged meeting comes to pass. And so to the end of the bro's tirade with a celebration of Ming the Merciless ...

Australia has two key interests with Trump: preserving the US-Australia alliance and maintaining the deepest possible US involvement in our region. A third interest, which we control more independently of the Americans, is building a militarily powerful ADF.
Nor did Curtin found the US alliance, as Albanese wrongly claims. In the late 1940s the US had no interest in a formal alliance with the Labor government. The ANZUS alliance was founded in 1951 by the Menzies government.
So far, Albanese is performing badly on all three key national interests. This silly speech will do nothing to convince Washington there is a serious government in Canberra. The argument for the Americans taking nuclear submarines out of their own order of battle to provide them to us, in 2032, is thus weakened.
This speech would play well to a Fabian Society meeting circa 1976. It has no upside today at all.

That reference to the Fabian Society really does date the bromancer, and is yet another reminder of the hive mind demographic. 

The pond suggests you could bump into a hundred vulgar youffs in the street, and likely a vast majority would remain clueless as to its meaning.

They would however get the reference in this Herbert cartoon ...

The news was everywhere a few days ago ...

Try Karim Zidan in the Graudian for taste, Donald Trump's UFC stunt is more than a circus. It's authoritarian theatre.

What joy if Albo scored a seat in the bleachers. What more joy if the bromancer decided to show he was all in on the cult of manly white nationalism by seeing how good he is with a rear naked choke hold ...

And so to the bonus, and here there's some good news. 

The cratering Caterist didn't make it into the lizard Oz early in the morning. Ssush, enough of those tears and sighs and sobs. Be composed in the bromancer way ...

The pond will keep a watch, and will regurgitate the quarry whisperer should he appear, but in the meantime Major Mitchell strolled in from the golf course to hack away at renewables ...

The header, urging the gassing of the country to save the planet: Ideology trumps facts as our leaders run out of gas, How can politicians seriously think of banning a fuel that AEMO acknowledges will be central to firming for another 30 years?
The caption for the quizzical mugshot: Australian Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: AAP
The mystical advice: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

According to the reptiles it was a full five minutes of furious fulminations, but the pond has ridden in this rodeo before ...

All the pond needed to do was let the Major deliver his tirade, full of the usual castigation, aspersions, execrations, belittlements and chastisements ...

The age of baseload power is over, Australian Energy Market Operator chief executive Daniel Westerman told a Melbourne business conference on May 1, two days before the federal election.
Labor’s rout of a Coalition that built its election campaign on supporting nuclear power and extending fossil fuel baseload power almost certainly means Westerman is correct.
While Energy Minister Chris Bowen focuses on getting a gold star from the UN by being awarded hosting rights for COP31 next year and Treasurer Jim Chalmers talks about a “Future Made In Australia”, voters will soon discover the true cost of being a world leader in renewable energy: heavy power price rises and a loss of manufacturing.
Other countries with high penetrations of renewable energy overwhelmingly rely on conventional hydro-electric power, as Tasmania has for 100 years.
Australia’s future will be built on solar, wind and firming from batteries, pumped hydro and gas. Former Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott told Patricia Karvelas on ABC Radio National in 2022: “It may not be possible but I think we’ve got to try.”
Two generations of voters and Labor politicians have grown up in a media environment that has persuaded them any questioning of renewables is climate denial.
While young people believe climate Armageddon is coming, the maximum they would be prepared to pay for clean energy is $50 a year, according to a survey reported by Spectator Australia. They are risking their unparalleled high standard of living for benefits they think are worth $50 annually.
Most of our environment writers ignore the wisdom of China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping who told his party’s latest Congress in 2022: “We will advance initiatives to reach peak carbon emissions in a well-planned and phased way, in line with the principle of getting the new before discarding the old.”
China is responsible for a third of global emissions. The US is number two emitter and the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. US President Donald Trump has pulled out of the Paris Accords.
The next largest emitters, India and Russia, are continuing to build coal-fired power plants.
Even the EU, which has been losing manufacturing industry to China and the US because of soaring European power prices driven by its renewables commitments, is under internal pressure to take its foot off the accelerator.
In Australia, we plan to shut our last coal-fired power plant by 2038, end 90 per cent of coal generation by 2035 and shut the country’s largest plant, Eraring in NSW, by 2027.
Westerman told his audience Australia had reached 100 per cent renewables generation last August but the highest penetration of renewables across the grid was the 75.6 per cent hit last November.
The Renew Economy website said “the gap between potential and actual renewable penetration” was explained by renewables generators curbing output because of low prices, lack of transmission line capacity and the need for grid stability.
Australia’s position is looking like a triumph of hope over experience as Labor’s belief in technologies that are yet to be proven is shaken by real world setbacks.
Think green hydrogen, which Chalmers and Bowen have said would make Australia a clean energy super power. Planned projects totalling up to $100bn have been cancelled or are on hold, because, as this column wrote on October 16, 2022, the economics don’t stack up.
Energy campaigner Saul Griffith had told an Australian Financial Review conference that for Twiggy Forrest’s green hydrogen plans to work, power would need to be priced at 2c per kilowatt hour rather than the-then range across the states from 25c to 40c.
Think offshore wind. Bowen is a keen advocate but this newspaper reported on Wednesday that Spanish offshore wind developer BlueFloat Energy, which has licences for projects off Victoria’s Gippsland coast and off NSW’s coast, is reconsidering its involvement in Australia. Norwegian developer Equinor has not decided on accepting an offshore licence in NSW.

The reptiles thought so little of this heaping of opprobrium that they offered just one visual distraction, a woman comically clutching her glasses, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan. Picture: Josie Hayden

Two can play that game. Here's a visual illustration of the lizard Oz's demographic, as seen by the pond in the lovely town of Yass yesterday morning ...

And so back to the Major, for a final lengthy spurt from the exhaust pipe.

Perhaps he was already at the nineteenth hole, having sunk quite a few.

Don't expect the pond to make any comments. 

If correspondents want to take the Major up, well and good, but the pond is done debating renewables and climate science with the reptiles ...

Don't expect the pond to go linking to stories in The Conversation, Experiencing extreme weather and disasters is not enough to change views on climate action, study shows.

As if the pond didn't already know that, as if the pond didn't regularly imbibe the routinely obtuse, obdurate, wilful and muleish Major ...

Federal Labor has also claimed Australia would become a powerhouse producer in the critical minerals industry that is key to the development of lithium ion batteries to replace non-electric power sources. China dominates rare earths production globally and battery manufacture.
While Australia exports rare earths, little headway has been made in refining them here. Power prices are cited as a limiting factor, as is Chinese price manipulation in the rare earths market.
Jennifer Hewett in the AFR last Wednesday, reporting Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s rare earths discussions at the Quad meeting in Washington DC, commented: “It’s notable BHP and Rio’s latest big bets in copper and lithium prospects respectively are in South America rather than Australia.”
Add February’s South Australian and federal bailouts at the Whyalla steel plant and pleas for government support by Glencore’s Mount Isa copper refinery, the Tomago aluminium smelter north of Sydney and South Australia’s Nyrstar multi-metals smelter, and this plank of Labor’s Future Made in Australia plans looks sick.
It gets worse. The biggest hurdle in our renewables transition is the government’s $20bn Rewiring the Nation project, which in many places is up to six years behind schedule and in some cases up to six times over budget.
Back to Westerman. His May speech said AEMO believes large spinning machines used in conventional generation would be required to maintain inertia in the grid, as this column has been arguing in pieces quoting US power system engineer Russ Schussler from Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. blog.
Leading environment journalist Giles Parkinson in his Renew Economy report of Westerman’s speech cast doubt on this. He suggested grid-forming battery inverters would do the trick.
There’s more. Nowhere has ideology trumped facts as plainly as in the gas market. It has been clear since Julia Gillard was Labor prime minister 15 years ago that Australia’s renewables transition would need gas back-up and that it would be less polluting than coal.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has now backtracked on predecessor Dan Andrews’ ban of domestic gas in new homes and in new industrial processes, a silly policy picked up this year by Sydney mayor Clover Moore.
How can politicians seriously think of banning a fuel that AEMO acknowledges will be central to firming for another 30 years?
And now Bowen, who rejected a Coalition plan for a domestic gas reservation policy at the election, has started an inquiry into his own gas reservation policy.
In the face of all this damage to our prosperity, the global Climate Action Tracker site rates Australia’s overall efforts on decarbonisation as “insufficient” and our net zero by 2050 efforts as “poor”.
It recommends Australia stop using agriculture to offset emissions. It says we should end all subsidies for fossil fuels and stop approving new coal and gas projects. It wants faster closure of fossil fuel power generation, mandatory electric vehicle use for transport, and emissions reductions in agriculture, industry and building.
It’s a recipe for a much poorer future that no large CO2 emitters are following.

All this comes at a time when the United States continues to experience record-shattering weather events, with a climate change denialist in the White House, busy stripping the United States of early warning systems, while stripping important climate-related data from the intertubes.

The pond couldn't make it up, but now must return to its opening lines for that comment from the immortal Rowe ...

It's always in the detail ...

And as the Major raised the matter of weather, the pond was most bemused by this string of X's ...

Came the capper ...

It seems Kandiss - where do they get these names from? - fancies herself  as a kontender ...

And so to the mother lode, the original barking mad Jewish space lasers Marge ... DB here, HuffPo here ...

If this is the bromancer's path to salvation, bring on a duck dish flavoured with Sichuan pepper so the pond can stay comfortably numb ...