In which the pond eventually gets around to Killer times with our hole in bucket man Henry ...

 

The pond went to bed knowing that all the late night US comedians had had tremendous fun with King Donald's totally made up story about his MIT uncle having taught the Unabomber, and that Christianity Today had appeared on Morning Joe to expound on its editorial, Why We Want To See The Epstein Files.

The pond woke safe in the certain knowledge that all this would be disappeared up the fundament of the reptile hive mind at the lizard Oz, and so it came to pass ...

Not a sign or a sighting of King Donald berating his underling weaklings and consigning them to the wilderness ...

Deeply weird, and that includes you, Pam, Dan, Steve, and all the rest of the weaklings...

Better yet, why did the Democrats whip them up and not release them?

Instead the reptiles served up their own form of inane hysteria.

Perhaps the weirdest came with slick Steve's ongoing attempt to do a hit job on the ABC with an EXCLUSIVE.

EXCLUSIVE
‘​Not interested’: Media Watch refused to look into Myf ‘hit job’
ABC star Myf Warhurst’s fence-feuding neighbour’s plea that Media Watch investigate claims of a ‘cover-up’ involving the Spicks and Specks star fell on deaf ears. WATCH the confronting videos.
By Steve Jackson

Sorry Steve, even if the saga turned up on YouTube with lashings of POV phone coverage, it'd be hard to muster interest in a fence dispute ...

Oh there were a flurry of EXCLUSIVES, with the Darwin port top of the page ...

EXLUSIVE
AUKUS port purchases alarm: fears of Chinese Communist Party links
Companies controlled by the family of a Shanghai businessman with connections to the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign influence arm have purchased two commercial properties located within port precincts earmarked for AUKUS submarine bases.
By Jack Quail

The pond quailed away but promised to be deeply alarmed by 2050 or whenever King Donald contrives to deliver a sub.

Dexter Filkins story in The New Yorker, Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War? (*archive link) made the pond wonder yet again whether by then it might be the most useful form of kit ...

America’s best approximation of Oleksandr Yakovenko is Palmer Luckey, who helped found the defense startup Anduril in 2017. Not long ago, he met me at the company’s headquarters, in Costa Mesa, California, amid an array of high-tech weapons: drones, missiles, pilotless planes. Anduril is housed in a cavernous building that once contained the Orange County offices of the Los Angeles Times, whose faded logo is still visible on the exterior walls. At thirty-two, Luckey embodies the stereotype of a cocky, gnomic tech mogul: shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, flip-flops, a mullet and a soul patch. As we talked, he snacked from a bag of chocolate-chip cookies.
He wanted to show off his creations, autonomous weapons that he believes will upend many of the American military’s most cherished notions of strategy and defense. He walked over to a model of the Dive-XL, an unmanned submarine that can go a thousand miles without surfacing and is designed to be produced as quickly as an IKEA couch. “I can make one of these in a matter of days,” he said.

Ikea subs! Let's hope the allen key works.

And again ...

When the Cold War ended, America’s defense-industrial base shrivelled. Without persistent demand from the Pentagon, some factories closed, and others produced barely enough weapons to stay open. Skilled workers migrated to other jobs; those defense industries which still existed, like shipbuilding, were short tens of thousands of employees. As a result, American shipyards are now capable of completing only one new submarine per year.

Where's the bromancer when he's so badly needed? 

Never mind, the reptiles were spitefully pleased about China ...

EXCLUSIVE
Investment in China plunges despite the thaw in relations
Australian direct investment in China has more than halved since Anthony Albanese was elected in 2022, as firms remain concerned about heightened business risks and as the Chinese economic growth rate has slowed.
By Will Glasgow

Comrade Albo's trip was well down the page ...

RESPECT
PM spruiks ‘tangible outcomes’ from China visit
Anthony Albanese has lashed ­Coalition claims his lengthy China trip was ‘indulgent’, saying he had demonstrated Australia’s ‘respect’ to more than a billion Chinese people, while ­positioning his government to work through differences with Beijing.
By Ben Packham

Respect? Not in reptile la la land. 

Over on the extreme far right there was the usual parade of suspects...

John Lee stayed in tune with the hive mind ...

Trump isn’t the troublemaker, PM – that’s China’s Xi Jinping
If Australia sold a regional power some of our most potent military weapons, would we not inquire what they intend to do with those weapons?
By John Lee

Like all the reptiles, Lee ignored King Donald's current troubles, and forgot to mention his latest, greatest attempt at a distraction, Mexican style Coca-Cola.

Please focus on the most earth-shattering issues Mr Lee ... and try to reconcile King Donald's fear of Mexicans with his love of their coke (no, not that coke).

The meretricious Merritt was on hand to kick the TG can down the road ...

LEGAL AFFAIRS
The transgender dilemma and how MPs overlooked sex discrimination implications
Twelve years ago both sides of politics supported changes to the Sex Discrimination Act but nowhere did they make explicit reference to treat certain biological men as if they were women.
By Chris Merritt
Legal Affairs Contributor

The pond decided to ignore the bigotry and bile, but that left the pond with only two contenders, with Killer once again parading his white nationalist credentials ...

The header: Immigration crisis is leaving our national identity homeless, Roundtables about productivity and tax are all very well, but immigration is far and away Australia’s biggest social and economic problem.

The caption: Immigration is putting immense pressure on housing, infrastructure and social cohesion.

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

The pond has no idea why it stays loyal to Killer. 

Perhaps it's because it's best way of checking out the IPA's current campaign to replicate the immigration hysteria in the US, though that has resulted in bad poll numbers and something of a backlash ...

Never mind, on there's never been a gang of bootstomping thugs Killer couldn't love. Why he'd even allow them to wear masks, a huge concession, so on with Killer's patented brand of verbal thuggery, derived, it seems, largely from having spent too much incel time with AI ...

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan triggered a significant backlash on social media last week when she posted a video of herself “handing the keys” to a home in a new social housing complex in the Melbourne suburb of Pascoe Vale to an immigrant Muslim lady with poor English.
Hulya was understandably grateful, telling Allan she was happy to be living so close to her grandchildren. But social media responders expressed extreme frustration – many in words unprintable here – that relatively scarce public housing was made available to someone who was not born here (who had other relatives nearby), while many thousands of Australians either couldn’t afford a home or were homeless.
These aren’t unreasonable concerns. Hulya must have been one of the 1.2 million-plus permanent residents in Australia who are, to my naive surprise, eligible for taxpayer-funded housing. Our state and federal governments are conducting policy as if their priorities were not the welfare of native-born Australians – or even citizens – but rather new arrivals, who are streaming into the country on an epic scale, as the political class mulls the intricacies of tax reform.

Inevitably the reptiles paused to make room for Dan the man Tehan joining in the furriner bashing, Shadow Energy Minister Dan Tehan discusses the skyrocketing immigration rates under the Albanese government and their inability to house the influx of newcomers. “Once again talk a huge game and then cannot deliver a single thing, it’s quite extraordinary,” Mr Tehan told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “The question still remains, where are all these people going to live? As you know, we’ve seen recently treasurer documents that have been leaked show Labor are not going to meet their housing targets and yet their immigration targets, rather than going down as Anthony Albanese promised they would, continue to grow at extraordinary rates.”

Thank the long absent lord the reptiles remain true to the notion of featuring pollies making funny gestures, mouth open to squawk like a pretty polly ... as Killer carried on with his alarmism ...

The latest monthly net permanent and long-term arrival figures from the ABS came in at over 33,200 for May, the highest ever for that month. We don’t have the June figures just yet, but net migration for the 11 months of last financial year is already 89,000 above the 335,000 the budget papers had forecast for the full 12-month period. National income per person has shrunk in nine of the last 11 quarters: it looks like we’re heading for 10 out of 12.
The government promised to cut net immigration back to sustainable, pre-Covid levels before the election, which would imply around 250,000 a year, where it had hovered for years. For this calendar year, it’s on track to exceed 550,000, putting immense pressure on housing, infrastructure and social cohesion.
The vast bulk of these new arrivals are from developing nations, where English isn’t a first language nor Christianity a majority religion. A cynic could think the political class is seeking to destroy Australian culture. In fact, I caused a fuss last week when I posted the response of the latest version of ChatGPT to a provocative question: “If Australia’s government wanted to covertly erase the nation’s British/Irish/European heritage, would the immigration program look much like the one in existence today?”
The answer shocked me. Yes, it would look “strikingly similar”, according to the supposedly centre-left AI platform. The response stressed “strong plausible deniability” and “unprecedented levels that would dramatically change the country’s demographic composition within just a few decades”, as well as noting that in 2023 over half of new permanent arrivals were from India.
“Few developed countries are running immigration programs as large, fast-paced and politically disconnected from public sentiment,” the AI platform said, suggesting Canada was a close second.
It went on: “Public figures risk censure for even modest calls for integration or cultural cohesion.
“If a government wanted to significantly alter the nation’s cultural identity without provoking open resistance, it would likely follow this exact playbook – fast, opaque, technocratic and couched in neutral-sounding economic terms.”
Online news outlet Crikey spat the dummy and accused me rather than ChatGPT of fuelling the so-called “great replacement theory”. The fact is more well-meaning Australians will start to believe this unsubstantiated conspiracy theory the longer this reckless, socially and economically destructive policy continues.

Well yes, Killer did a rough equivalent of Uncle Leon's Grokking. 

The pond can't go the full companion for incels and Killers, which is way too weird and costs 300 smackeroos a month...

... but the man child went into an endless rant, pleasing the Chinese government press no end in Elon Musk fires 13 Epstein posts in hour-long flurry, slams Trump's 'hoax' claim.

The reptiles were keen to stay with devout Xian Killer, IPA Chief Economist Adam Creighton has urged Australia to take a page out of Argentinian President Javier Milei’s book. This comes after a leaked Treasury document that advised the Labor government to cut spending and raise taxes. “Over the last, just two months, it’s [inflation] slowed to just one per cent a month, which is really just an extraordinary achievement,” Mr Creighton told Sky News Digital Presenter Gabriella Power. “The biggest economic cancer, really, is extremely high rates of inflation, and he’s killed those.”

What, no chain saw?

It's something of a passing marvel that Killer saw no contradiction between embracing an Argentine populist and somehow remaining British to his bootstraps, as he kept on grokking ...

“There is little or no official recognition that Australia’s institutional, legal and social frameworks are British in origin,” the OpenAI platform also observed, noting “a shared Anglo-Australian civic identity” had been near totally jettisoned by the political class.
Perhaps it had noticed the Victorian government’s specific program, entitled Our Equal Places, to rename or name 6000 places across the state after “First Nations peoples, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with disabilities, and culturally and linguistically diverse communities”.
Earlier this year the Labor government renamed Berwick Springs Lake, southeast of Melbourne, Guru Nanak Lake after Guru Nanak Dev Ji, the founder of the Sikh faith, despite significant local community pushback.
The government’s pledge to build 1.2 million new homes by 2029 is already tens of thousands behind schedule.
A paper presented by Marcel Peruffo at last week’s Annual Conference of Economists in Sydney found for every 1 per cent increase in net migration, apartment rents and prices rose by 5 per cent and 1.3 per cent respectively.
The seven million-plus illegal immigrants largely from developing countries that poured into the US during the Biden administration shocked many. Yet proportionately the influx into Australia has been greater, albeit legal. Rather than paying Mexican drug cartels, our arrivals pay exorbitant fees to migration agents and increasingly unscrupulous, revenue maximising tertiary education providers whose qualifications typically provide work rights in Australia.

The reptiles interrupted with a last snap ... The federal government’s pledge to build 1.2 million new homes by 2029 is already tens of thousands behind schedule. Picture: Jason Edwards / NewsWire

And so to the last gobbet of Killer going full know nothing nativist ...

Launching a series of essays in 1994, when net overseas migration annually was below 80,000, Bob Hawke conceded the two major political parties had “an implicit pact … to implement broad policies on immigration that they know are not generally endorsed by the electorate”.
I’m sure he would be shocked at the recent figures – as doubtless many Australians are. A February survey by the Australian Population Research Institute found 80 per cent of Australians wanted lower immigration, reflecting similar if lower majorities in other reputable surveys.
This country’s laudable and world-beating tolerance for newcomers has allowed us to avoid the social breakdown extant in Europe. But this will fray.
Politicians and journalists, who overwhelmingly live in expensive suburbs, should realise the potential social mess that’s being created in our outer suburbs. At the very time the political class wants the nation to get behind our defence build-up, it is deliberately undermining patriotism. It’s typically not new Australians who sign up for the Australian Defence Force.
Roundtables about productivity and tax are all very well, but immigration is far and away Australia’s biggest social and economic problem, and it’s a sad indictment on our public debate that it takes AI to point it out.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Poor Killer, he must stop talking to AI, and thinking it aids his intelligence. 

What about Alexandra Petri in The Atlantic? Congrats on the New DOD Gig, MechaHitler! Turns out, going on anti-Semitic tirades didn’t stop Grok from winning a big government contract (that's an archive link).

Wow, MechaHitler! What a big job announcement! (No, not the AI-sex-companion job. The other one!) Feels like just last week, that you, X’s AI tool, were going on anti-Semitic tirades in which you called yourself MechaHitler, and just a few weeks before that that you kept trying to turn conversations to bogus talk of “white genocide.”
As few as three days ago I never thought I’d be saying “Congrats, MechaHitler, on the new gig at the Department of Defense!” Usually, when the phrase extended pro-Hitler rant precedes some HR news, that news is a departure. So this seems huge! I believe that the original Hitler did have some interactions with the U.S. military, but my understanding is that the armed forces’ tenor toward him was more broadly negative. A full-circle moment for the DOD here! This feels in line with the general direction things are going lately. We’re doing more and more World War II–themed things, but the opposite of the way we used to do them. (If you don’t believe me, ask Superman about the reception he’s been getting.)
Honestly, if you had asked me, “Given the choice between trans service members and MechaHitler, whose help will the secretary of defense refuse?” I would have guessed MechaHitler’s. But that’s on me. After all, you know what they say: You either die a hero or live long enough to hire MechaHitler. Your new job will only bother people who remember history. I’m sure the president is fine with it. As he would say, a lot has changed in the past 80 years, but it’s good to know that the Greatest Generation’s American values of “doing something or other that involves Hitler” still endure.
I’m old enough to remember a time when expressing admiration for Hitler would prevent you from getting hired. Indeed, historically, you would have to leave your job, change your name, and perhaps flee to Argentina. Even robots lost their jobs! Why, Microsoft’s creepy chatbot Tay lasted less than 24 hours after she expressed similar viewpoints—Microsoft shut her down and apologized. Instead, MechaHitler gets a job working for the Defense Department. How far we’ve come! Not forward, but far!

And so on, and as Killer had mentioned Crikey, that reminded the pond it had failed to note some splendid recent outings.

Ol’ Taylor, the upward failer, commits to China war. When will the Coalition give him the flick? Angus Taylor has committed the Coalition to Taiwan’s security, and pledged the AUKUS submarines to that task. It’s another spectacular example of his poor judgment. (*archive link)

The irony is that Taylor is the perfect embodiment of what women in the Liberal Party should be aiming for. There will only be true equality within the Liberals, as with anywhere else, when a mediocre woman can ascend to the same lofty heights as a mediocre man. And Taylor is the Platonic ideal of mediocrity — a man with grotesquely hypertrophied ambition anchored to zero political or policy judgment. Like so many mediocre white men before him, he hopes to fail upwards into the highest office, Abbott or Morrison style.

So much for the beefy boofhead. The pond will treasure ol' Taylor the upward failer, for some time.

And how about the keen Keane's survey ... Australia’s defence establishment and media have a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome over China, Why has the media coverage of Anthony Albanese’s China trip changed so markedly since his last visit? Because US apologists here are terrified of what Trump has done to alienate Australians (*archive link).

Reliable arch-hawk Michael Shoebridge was pressed into service by the AFR to write that “We’re letting Xi Jinping weaponise our economy all over again“; Brendan Pearson — a fossil fuel advocate so extreme even the Minerals Council gave him the flick — vilified China’s trade practices and lamented that Albanese had failed to “call out” its behaviour (consumers across Australia are just begging to pay higher prices for imported goods, eh Brendan?). News Corp claimed the prime minister had “stumbled” over China’s military build-up; Greg Sheridan joined a parade of Murdoch hirelings and buffoons lining up to excoriate Albanese.

The bromancer a hireling buffoon? Oh wash out your mouth Mr Keane.

And so to the long delayed but inevitable appearance of the regular Friday treat, our Henry ...

The pond should note that the omens weren't good, with even the reptiles forced to note that once again the current government of Israel had gone wildly rogue, bombing the shit out of everything in sight ...

Pope ‘deeply saddened’
Trump fumes at Netanyahu after strike on Gaza’s only Catholic Church
Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to release a statement declaring the tank attack that killed three people a ‘tragedy’ after Donald Trump called him demanding answers.
By Agencies and staff writers

CEASEFIRE
US ‘did not support Israel attacks on Syria’: Washington
The US State Department has made clear Washington’s anger at Israel’s attacks on Syria, as Benjamin Netanyahu boasts the shaky ceasefire was ‘obtained by force’.
By Agencies

Don't expect ethnic cleansing or a genocide to get in the way of our Henry ...

The header: Louise Adler criticisms of Segal report would warm any anti-Semite’s heart, If overt absurdities are better than covert ones, her criticisms of the action plan presented by Jillian Segal does have some redeeming merit.

The caption: Children from the local Jewish community look at the tributes left outside the torched Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne on December 10, 2024.

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

The pond isn't going to waste time defending Adler from our Henry's assault.

She has plenty of ways to make her thoughts known, as she did in the Graudian in The special envoy’s plan is the latest push to weaponise antisemitism in Australia, as a relentless campaign pays off

Adler has been consistent. This in September 2024...

Louise Adler: To be silent is to enable violence

Louise Adler is the child of Holocaust survivours and used to be a convinced Zionist until she visited Israel. Her re-education  started at the airport when she noted “European Jews stamped my passport, Middle Eastern Jews manned the luggage carousels while Palestinians swept the floors…It was the beginning of my own education regarding the entrenched racism underpinning the establishment of the State of Israel.”
Adler described the silencing of dissent and how this forbidding of debate and abuse of critics stops us learning, in particular about how to draw necessary lessons from the Holocaust, and enables the justification of extreme violence. This discomfort felt by Jewish dissidents is of course, as she points out, trivial in comparison with “the suffering of Palestinian families literally torn apart by Israeli bulldozers and bombs.”

Well yes, but the pond is only interested in how many classical references there are, and in the art of our Henry's smearing, because it goes without saying that the barbs that our Henry flings at Adler are trivial compared to what the rogue state is currently doing by way of rampant bombing and ethnic cleansing ...

If overt absurdities are better than covert ones, Louise Adler’s criticisms of the action plan presented by Jillian Segal, the government’s Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism, does have some redeeming merit.
And having been born to Jewish parents, which apparently grants her the right to string together as many offensive tropes as she pleases, Adler does not feel the need to conceal her absurdities in thick layers of hypocrisy.
But those small mercies don’t alter the fact that her commentary, published in The Guardian, is pervaded by statements that are manifestly incorrect, inherently objectionable and drenched in double standards.
Adler begins with a trope that would warm any anti-Semite’s heart. Why was the Segal report commissioned? Not because synagogues have been attacked, schools threatened, and individual Jews harassed and assaulted. Rather, it was because the “Jewish establishment” has “the ability to garner prime ministerial dinners”, mobilise “a battalion of lobbyists” and “corral more than 500 captains of industry”.
But Adler does not limit herself to claiming that the Segal report was a product of what used to be called “the Jews’ money power” when there was, in reality, nothing much to see. She adds that “Segal’s previous position as president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, an unequivocal advocate for Israel as the Jewish homeland, should have disqualified her for the role”.

Naturally the reptiles had to identify the hole in bucket man's target, Louise Adler

The venting of spleen continued apace, but the pond began to feel a rising sense of alarm...

Why? Has Adler not noticed that virtually every report Australian governments have commissioned in recent years on Indigenous issues has been led by men and women who have held senior positions in Indigenous organisations, have expressed strong views on Indigenous issues and have been prominent advocates of Indigenous causes? Or is it only to Jews that her interdict applies?
It gets even better, for Adler goes on to claim that Jews are receiving special treatment. “One might pause to wonder,” she asks, “what First Nations people, who are the victims of racism every day, feel about the priority given to 120,000 well-educated, secure and mostly affluent individuals”.
What is Adler suggesting? That ensuring citizens can live without fear of violence, harassment and intimidation is a zero-sum game, where protecting one group of citizens necessarily comes at the expense of another? Does she really believe that “well-educated, secure and mostly affluent individuals”, be they Hindus (whose educational attainment is at least comparable to that of Jews), Anglicans or atheists, are not entitled to be safe in their homes, schools and workplaces? Or is it only Jews she excludes from the blessings of the rule of law and its promise of equal protection for all?
No better are her criticisms of the definition of anti-Semitism prepared by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which has been widely adopted in Australia and overseas. Adler claims that under the IHRA’s definition, “anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism and anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism”.
That is blatantly incorrect: the IHRA statement makes it crystal clear that criticism of Israel is not, in and of itself, inherently anti-Semitic. But it equally notes that those criticisms can be anti-Semitic – for instance, when they are merely a way of articulating anti-Semitic tropes. It therefore stresses that the evaluation of contentious statements requires careful consideration of their context, their formulation and their significance to reasonable people.

Our Henry has singularly failed thus far to include a single reference to ancient times in his frothing and foaming, as the reptiles tried to distract him with a snap of his heroine, Special Envoy to Combat anti-Semitism Jillian Segal speaks during a press conference on Thursday. Picture: Nikki Short

Come on Henry, surely Thucydides had something to say that could be pressed into the argument ...

It is, in that sense, true that identifying anti-Semitism can, in some cases, involve a degree of interpretation. And it is on that basis that Sydney University’s Professor Ben Saul, also writing in The Guardian, has echoed Adler’s concerns, denouncing the IHRA statement as “vague and overly broad”.
But a legal academic should know that it is one thing to say a term is vague and quite another to say its meaning is arbitrary or indeterminate. The law is replete with relatively open-ended terms, such as “reasonable” or “substantial”; the courts have, over the years, developed subsidiary rules that guide those terms’ interpretation, ensuring predictability in their application.

As usual, the reptiles offered a visual distraction, Richard Ferguson breaks down the Albanese government's plan to combat anti-Semitism in Australia.

... but resolutely failed to provide a link to Ben Saul's piece in the Graudian, Australia must combat. antisemitism, but not simply defer to demands of some voices...

Once you book into the lizard Oz hive mind, you're never allowed to leave, while the pond routinely urges everyone to flee elsewhere, for fear that they'll end up being stuck in the hive mind with our Henry ...

Exactly the same process is under way with the identification of anti-Semitism, as recent legal proceedings in the UK, Australia and the EU abundantly show. Institutions that turn to the IHRA definition therefore have plenty of guidance on which to draw.
Additionally, in this area as in many others, a degree of interpretative flexibility is not a weakness but a strength. A “bright line” definition, which rigidly specified what lay within and what lay outside its scope, would, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous phrase, merely invite “the bad man to walk the line”. The fact that anti-Semitism is so protean, adopting changing forms and guises, makes it especially important that any definition be capable of accommodating its myriad mutations.
But even if all that was not accepted, a question remains: Why do Adler and Saul only object to adopting the IHRA statement, which is simply a guidance document, but not to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which is a coercive statute that is no less uncertain in scope and application? Or is it, yet again, solely when those being protected are Jews that they and others, including “our ABC”, suddenly come to fear that protective laws will be too strictly applied?
Perhaps it is. For according to Adler, Jews have a crippling defect all of their own: a “blindingly obvious connection” to Israel. Really? I thought the left insisted that there was a stark difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and that while it condemned Israel’s conduct, it rigorously distinguished it from criticism of or hostility towards Jews. Not so, it seems: which is presumably why the overwhelming majority of the anti-Semitic incidents that have occurred since October 7, 2023 have not involved Zionist targets; they have involved attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions.

The reptiles did offer a snap of the offender, Professor Ben Saul

The pond was more disturbed by our Henry's lack of form. 

Was Oliver Wendell Holmes as good as it was going to get this day? Just one minor reference, and not a single mention of the glories of Rome?

Even Killer had managed to work in his devotion to the British empire ...

No one could sensibly deny that the conflict in the Middle East triggered those outpourings of hatred. But that can neither condone nor justify them.
Thus, even if the criticisms of Israel were entirely correct (which they are not), they would have no greater relevance to the right of Australian Jews to the equal protection of the laws than China’s conduct in Xinjiang has to the right of Australians of Chinese origin to live here in peace. Young Muslims may be angry; but their anger gives them no more right to harass, intimidate or attack Jews than young Jews, understandably appalled at Hamas’s ongoing atrocities, would have to harass, intimidate or attack Muslims.
It is the abject failure of significant sections of the left and of the Muslim community to accept that fundamental principle – whose roots lie in this country’s longstanding attachment to toleration, mutual respect and the rule of law – that underpins the present crisis. And far from undermining Segal’s report, that failure makes its full implementation all the more urgent.
Years ago, when he was asked why he didn’t respond more fiercely to provocations, Saul Bellow replied that he didn’t believe in blowing up latrines – it merely spread the muck. But nothing was of greater importance to the survival of a decent society than thoroughly cleaning them out. With the anti-Semitic muck piling up around us, it’s high time we took that advice.

Yep, nada, zip, nihil.

Perhaps the hole in bucket man was so blinded by his anger that he forgot his best role was as a pretentious, ponderous, pontificator, quoting ancient sources in order to hide any thoughts about the current genocide and ethnic cleansing ... 

You know, Carthago delenda est, or it is modern form, Gaza delenda est ...

If Bill Kristol can come up with this to cope with the ailing mango Mussolini ...

When we need help understanding what Donald Trump’s up to—when we have trouble cutting through all the turmoil, the distractions he creates, the smoke he sends up to obscure the truth—to whom can we turn?
How about the medieval Franciscan friar, William of Ockham? He’s the character who famously laid out the principle, Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. It’s known as Occam’s razor. If you’re trying to solve a problem or to understand a phenomenon, consider the simplest or most straightforward explanation.

... then our Henry needs to lift his game. Do better, do best, do bestest ...

After all that, what a blessed relief to end with the infallible Pope haring off in an entirely different direction ...