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 ...