In which the pond offers endless distractions before settling on the bromancer like a yellow fog curling around a chimney...

Why should pond correspondents have all the fun? 

Sure, their offerings are more droll and amusing than the pond wasting time on reptile stodge, but dammit ...

Called to this work by Dullness, Jove, and Fate;
You by whose care, in vain decried and cursed,
Still King Donald the second reigns like King Donald the first;
Say how the Goddess bade America sleep,
And poured her spirit o’er the land and deep.
     In eldest time, e’er mortals writ or read,
E’er Pallas issued from the Thunderer’s head,
Dullness o’er all possessed her ancient right,
Daughter of Chaos and eternal Night:
Fate in their dotage this fair idiot gave,
Gross in his life, and as his minions grave,
Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind,
He ruled, in native anarchy, the mindless MAGA mind.

With apologies to Alexander ...

And what of the Earl of Rochester's satyr on King Donald?

Like the French fool, that wanders up and down
Starving his people, hazarding his crown.
Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such,
And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
Nor are his high desires above his strength:
His scepter and his prick are of a minute length ...

Apologies to the Earl ...

Yes, the pond occasionally strays from the reptiles, and those two examples came from Colin Burrow's notes on satire in the LRB under the header Let custards quake (*archive link).

While out in the field straying from the wretched reptiles, the pond recommends Will Tavlin's richly comic Casual Viewing, Why Netflix looks like that (*archive link), for n+1 (where "n" in this case equals ning nongs on Netflix) .

It's long, but it's full of bon mots, and it reminded the pond why it gave up on Netflix, Amazon, Apple and all the rest of the streaming tribe (and never took up Paramount in particular, for reasons that are obvious)...

...if Netflix now occupies a place in the market similar to cable companies, the business it’s most spiritually aligned with is Blockbuster: a widely disliked service staffed by people who know nothing about movies, stocked with thousands of titles to see, few of them worth watching. Even Netflix knows its users can’t find titles that they like. In 2021, the company briefly introduced a new feature on its home page, called “Play Something,” to help in what the streamer called “times when we just don’t want to make decisions.” When clicked, Play Something instantly began playing for users an algorithmically chosen series or film. “Whether you’re in the mood for a new or familiar favorite,” Netflix wrote, “just ‘Play Something’ and let Netflix handle the rest.”

“Play Something,” as in: play anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, if a user is on their phone or cleaning their room. What matters is that it’s on, and that it stays on until Netflix asks its perennial question, a prompt that appears when the platform thinks a user has fallen asleep: “Are you still watching?”

But the theme for the day was cowardly custards, and so the pond must return to the theme to see the cowardly custard reptiles in their native habitat ...

Say what, another distraction, this one from the WSJ? ... 

Why Israel’s Chaotic New Food Program in Gaza Has Turned So Deadly (*archive link), Visit to one distribution site shows how system designed to squeeze out U.N. and Hamas continues to draw hungry Palestinians into deadly encounters

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip—Thousands of hungry Palestinians amassed last Tuesday morning outside a barbed-wire fence surrounding the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid center here. The moment the gates cracked open, the crowd surged forward. 
American security contractors tried to keep control, but scores of men pushed through barricades and snatched boxes of food awaiting distribution. Others sprinted in behind them. Men on speeding motorcycles raced past the pedestrians to grab whatever food they could. Gunshots rang out—it wasn’t clear from where. Within about 15 minutes, all the food was gone.
Chaotic scenes like that one, witnessed by a Wall Street Journal reporter, have plagued the new food-distribution system run by an Israeli-backed foundation known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Since the program began two months ago, hundreds of people have died and hundreds more have been wounded trying to get food from the four GHF sites, according to local health authorities. Israel’s military acknowledges opening fire on crowds that come too close to its troops.
As the death toll has climbed, the United Nations, many humanitarian organizations and more than 20 governments have condemned the new approach, which supplanted a much larger U.N. effort. Israel said the new system is intended to prevent Hamas from diverting aid to fuel its operations.
Anyone who hasn’t witnessed the scene on the ground here might wonder how such violence could result from a food-distribution operation. The Journal’s observation of one morning’s distribution effort—from when it kicked off to when it was overrun—reveals some reasons why the setup has been so beset with problems. 
For starters, GHF relies on the Israeli military nearby to provide security and keep its workers safe, which brings sometimes desperate Palestinian crowds into close proximity with troops. The U.N.’s food-distribution points, by contrast, didn’t usually have Israeli troops nearby.
A second big problem is that the demand for food far outstrips GHF’s current capacity, resulting in overwhelming numbers of people fighting to get their hands on scarce rations.
Aid-related violence also has broken out far from GHF sites. On Sunday, dozens of Palestinians were killed or wounded as they sought aid passing into northern Gaza from Israel, according to local health authorities. The Israeli military said thousands of Gazans had gathered in the north of the Strip, and it fired “warning shots” to remove a threat posed to soldiers. The military disputed the casualty numbers reported by Gazan authorities.
There were no reported casualties at the GHF site on the outskirts of Khan Younis the day the Journal visited. GHF said its post-operation report for that Tuesday didn’t show any shooting by its security contractors, though shots are audible on a video taken by the Journal. Israeli soldiers weren’t present at the site itself, though there was a tank nearby.
But the next day—last Wednesday—at least 20 people were killed in a crush at the site, according to health authorities and GHF. GHF said its security contractors had pepper-sprayed people rushing the site that day. 
Ahmad Tareq al-Dahoudi was one of those trying to get food that day. “I couldn’t breathe from the smell,” he recalled. “I didn’t get anything and ran away. There were lots of children, women and elderly people. I saw about 15 dead bodies.”
Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli general who once headed Israel’s Gaza division, said: “The area is not stable, it’s under chaos. The threat of starvation under those conditions is so severe that there’s no way you can create a stable system in unstable surroundings.”

And so on, and on, and that's mass starvation as part of an ethnic cleansing, a genocide, which brings the pond to the end of another LRB offering, Adam Shatz's The World since 7 October (*archive link) ... and how the current genocide might be brought to an end by talking. It's not a happy conclusion ...

...What would it take for such talks to occur? The Israelis, who are more isolated but also more powerful than ever, aren’t keen to have them. As the human rights lawyer Michael Sfard wrote recently in Haaretz, Israeli Jews have been ‘high on drugs full of swaggering slogans and floating in military ecstasy’ since the war with Iran; ending the suffering in Gaza or creating a Palestinian state are the furthest things from their minds. They insist that they can never trust Palestinians after 7 October, while Palestinians have even less reason to trust them after the genocide they have visited on Gaza, to say nothing of the ongoing and increasingly violent campaign to colonise the West Bank, in which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been driven from their homes – the largest displacement there since 1967. Even if Israelis and Palestinians agreed to sit down together, who would broker the talks? The asymmetry between the two sides is overwhelmingly in Israel’s favour, and the US has invariably acted as its advocate in negotiations. Malley and Agha know this, of course. The conclusion of their mostly grim and unflinching book feels, at times, like wishful thinking: what – and who – would compel any of these people to talk to one another, especially after the genocide in Gaza? Even if they did, what would this accomplish? The proposal is, to say the least, untimely. But the ground may be shifting, and, along with it, the balance of forces. The regime of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and now genocide has eroded Israel’s moral capital, and opposition has not only grown, but has begun to make itself felt in a new generation of progressive activists and politicians. Even so, it’s extremely difficult to imagine the dismantling of Israel’s apartheid system, or to imagine a serious challenge to its domination emerging anytime soon. In a world of rising authoritarianism and ethnonationalism, where the rule of law has all but crumbled, the brutal, pitiless state run by Netanyahu looks more like a pioneer than an outlier.

You won't find any reptile scribbling in the lizard Oz about the the brutal, pitiless state run by Netanyahu...they love it, they love brutality and pitilessness and the horror, oh the horror ...

The pond had prepared alternative reading this day on the off chance that the reptiles would disappoint more than they usually disappoint - they always disappoint - and so it came to pass...

Look, there's a TG "zeal"...

EXCLUSIVE
Testing the Waters: Greens leader backs party purge to enforce transgender zeal
The Greens’ new leader, Larissa Waters, is resisting calls to intervene in the widening row over the minority party’s embrace of transgender rights and halt a purge of members who don’t toe the line.
By Jamie Walker and Marcus de Blonk Smith

And by the time the zeal had shifted over to the extreme far right it had become a "cult" ...

‘Transgender cult’ purges Greens of its true believers
The Greens in some states have been taken over by a cult that has come to control key decision-making positions in the party.
By Drew Hutton

Putting inverted commas around it doesn't make it right, and if Drew thinks the planet will be fixed by abusing TG folk, then the planet is truly stuffed.

The pond refuses to indulge rancid bigots of any kind, but especially TG bigots ...

There wasn't much else. 

James bleating away about super, in the endless reptile way, and poor ancient Troy drew the short straw. 

Troy was handed the duty of remembering a rancid conservative who became increasingly sour in the years after the stripping of his cardigan ...

Colour, courage and a sharp tongue – the Stone Age is a bygone era
John Stone was a formidable secretary of Treasury. He offered unvarnished assessments of treasurers he worked with, from Billy Snedden, Frank Crean and Jim Cairns to Bill Hayden, John Howard and Paul Keating.
By Troy Bramston

Senior Writer

Always ready to toss a stone, he was a failed politician, he was a IPA devotee and a Quad ranter of the first water, with his wiki reminding the pond of some of his greatest hits ... including bashing Asians and supporting corrupt Joh's folly.

If the pond needed any more reminders, there's Dominic Kelly in Inside Story, The former Treasury head was revealed as an arch-reactionary in his second career (*archive link)

Inter alia ...

...Mabo in particular seemed to unleash something visceral in Stone. Having already been accused of racism against Asians in the 1980s (and later — following the 11 September terrorist attacks — against Muslims), Stone’s contempt for First Peoples and their culture became an ongoing feature of his writing. “The less said about the violence-racked, female-oppressive, sexually predatory cultures of the Australian Aboriginal the better,” he wrote in the Australian in 2010. Introducing a 2017 address to the Samuel Griffith Society, Stone declared, to laughter from the audience: “I’m beginning with a welcome to country — a welcome to our country. So let me begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land: King George III and his heirs and assigns.” His final piece of published writing, for the Australian edition of the Spectator in March 2023, was a passionate denunciation of the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

The best that ancient Troy could make of this ratbag lurch to the extreme far right?

...In later years, Stone drifted further to the right and was a prominent contributor to policy debates, took positions with think tanks and wrote articles for newspapers and journals. He could still be prickly when criticised and held nothing back in his assessments, usually poor, of politicians and public servants. He maintained that every government spent and borrowed too much.
He lamented how his department had lost its authority. “Treasury has been vastly diminished over recent decades,” he told me. Treasury seems unwilling to speak truth to power, its forecasts are routinely wrong and it no longer has the status it once did.
The Stone Age is indeed a bygone era.

Thank the long absent lord for that and no need for crocodile tears. The pond is as much in a mood for black bashing as it is for TG bashing this day, and that left only one choice ... release the files.

Better still, release the Marge calling for the release of the files...

To help Marge, release Tom Tomorrow...

Better still, release the Lutnick ... Trump Makes 1AM Calls to ‘Friends’ to Talk About Himself (*archive link).

President Donald Trump phones Howard Lutnick almost every night after the commerce secretary goes to bed around 1 a.m.—sometimes merely to gossip, talk about sport or seek feedback on his media appearances.
The bizarre habit was revealed by Lutnick himself in a lengthy profile by The New Yorker, which also cited sources within Trump’s orbit variously describing the gregarious Cabinet minister as “an errand boy”; a “non-stop” talker; and someone without the smarts of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Better than that, release the original New Yorker profile, Donald Trump’s Tariff Dealmaker-in-Chief, How Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, plans to transform government into a money-making enterprise. (*archive link)

...Lutnick’s muddled riffing, and what one person close to his team called his “naïve optimism that he can sell anything,” was seen in some quarters as a liability. “Generally speaking, he needs to be kept off TV,” a veteran Trump adviser said. Another MAGA operative described Lutnick as a “carnival barker.” Steve Bannon called his appearances “an unmitigated disaster.” When I recently asked top-ranking White House officials about Lutnick, they presented a united front. Vice-President J. D. Vance told me, “Howard is a natural salesman.” Hassett said, “Howard has an enormously high level of energy.” Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, added, “No one fights harder than Howard.” Nevertheless, one person close to the Administration told me that many in the White House view Lutnick as “disreputable, so when you need to have a bad guy, people blame him. He’s not seen as a real actor. He’s an errand boy.”

Sorry, all that talk of Neflix and errand boys was a joke and a distraction, a bit like Mexican coke or the Washington Redskins. 

Back to lizard Oz business, release the bromancer ...

The header: Why does the left wage war against the poor?, There is really a left-wing assault against the poor, evident in a thousand policy areas and big ideas that are bad ideas. Winning one election well does not remotely guarantee policy success.

The caption: Sir Keir Starmer speaks with Anthony Albanese at the G7 Summit in Kananaskis, Alberta. Picture: AP

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

The great thing about the bromancer in this sort of mood is that he's incredibly whiny and needy and churlish, which is why he has to begin with a billy goat butt ...

As they begin a new parliamentary term it would be churlish not to acknowledge the achievement of Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party. They have a big ­parliamentary majority. Ours is a parliamentary system, so that’s what’s required.

How that sticks in the reptile craw. After all their campaigning, it came to this...

And yet the bromancer keeps flailing away, like a bird that insists on bouncing up against the glass over and over again ...

And yet, it’s the counter-intuitive, perhaps contra mundum, idea of this column that the centre left is in crisis around the democratic world. The reason for this crisis is simple. Everything the centre left offers programmatically is bad for poor people especially, but for the societies more generally that the centre left claims to serve.
The fact of a big election win doesn’t of itself contradict the reality that the policy program of the centre left is disastrous, especially for the poor.
Before analysing why this is so, let me offer three examples of centre left governments elected handsomely which then failed dismally in office.
Joe Biden won 81 million votes, the most any candidate for the presidency of the US has ever won, and yet his presidency was disastrous, on illegal immigration, inflation, energy costs, social cohesion and much else. As a result, Donald Trump won a historic victory straight after Biden. Biden’s program was uncannily similar to Albanese’s.

And King Donald's reign has been a triumph?

Naughty cat, naughty Superman, and more on naughty aliens anon ...

Best not go there, best not to dwell on King Donald, best to do the preferred bromancer strategy of bringing Gough into the discussion, though the pond does wonder why the reptiles do this, because it must mean SFA to the vulgar youff they hope to attract to halt failing sales... Anthony Albanese. Gough Whitlam.

Do go on with the Gough routine ...

Example two is Keir Starmer’s Labour government in Britain. Like the Albanese government, it received a low primary vote but in the translation of votes to seats, like the Albanese government, won a huge parliamentary majority. Yet now the Starmer government is shockingly unpopular and is consistently polling behind Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.
It’s a long way to an election, but if one were held now, Farage could very well be PM. Starmer has failed in budget repair, welfare reform and immigration control.
Example number three, less relevant because it’s not contemporary, but well worth considering, is Gough Whitlam’s govern­ment. In 1972, Whitlam won a handsome victory and seemed the way of the future.
His government was a rollicking shambles from the start but he won a narrow re-election in 1974, mainly because the opposition leader, Billy Snedden, was so hopeless. In 1975 Whitlam suffered the greatest electoral landslide drubbing in Australian political history. He stayed on as opposition leader and got almost as bad a result in 1977.
All this shows that a government which looks well set can quickly collapse, but there needs to be a credible, or at least slightly likeable or charismatic, opposition leader.

And there's the bromancer's relitigating of the 1970s in a nutshell ...

Example number three, less relevant because it’s not contemporary

It's fifty years ago. The bromancer might just as well have proposed Example number three, less relevant because it’s not contemporary, but well worth considering, is Jack Lang’s govern­ment. 

It's called clutching at straws, which is why the reptiles keep clutching at the man who lost his seat and government, the lying rodent ... Former prime minister John Howard says the “absence of a strong economic alternative” was the “major” reason the Coalition did not win the federal election. “I think they have to focus on a coherent, clear, understandable policy setting, particularly economic,” Mr Howard told Sky News Australia. “Labor Party did better than I thought they would. “What we want are polices that are good for both women and men.”

And so on to Western civilisation, the great replacement, the British bulldog, the glory of empire, yaddda yadda ...

The deeper problem for contemporary centre left parties is this. Their program does gain some initial popularity because it involves massively increased government spending and the recipients of that spending like it for a while. But the underlying truth is that every big idea the left has had in the past 40 years runs in some way against human nature. Because the left, since it parted ways with Western tradition, has been trying to refashion humanity to fit the various ideological constructs which it itself very often doesn’t fully understand.

The pond's deeper problem is this. The pond sees flawed theories and practices on both sides, correction, on all sides, including the fallible pond, but how is it possible to take seriously the thoughts of a man who eats human flesh and drinks human blood of a Sunday?

Never mind, cue Sir Keir, and shush, no mention of Palestine Action because the bromancer, together with Sir Keir, wouldn't be able to cope, Sir Keir Starmer speaks to the media outside of the West Wing of the White House in Washington.

Another humanitarian hub bites the dust as the genocide goes on, and all the bromancer can offer is blather about human nature ...

Because these ideas typically are so radically against the real nature of human life, they hit people with fewer resources harder than they hit people with lots of resources, even when their purpose is ­ostensibly redistribution.
Consider just a few of the left’s big ideas over the past couple of decades. The nation has just decided to go back to phonics in the teaching of literacy to our kids. I’m old enough that I was actually taught to read using phonics. It’s a great system. You sound the letters out. It gives kids a good idea of letters, combinations of letters which produce sounds, and the structure of words and language.
The education left, a subset of the ideological left, as part of the grand left project of remaking ­society, rebelled against all traditional forms of learning. With a defective understanding of humanity, they pioneered the idea of whole language approaches. Kids would just see whole words and recognise them semi-spontaneously.
The predictable result was a disastrous collapse in literacy standards, colossal decline on international literary tables for Australia, and a slow coming back to what our grandparents knew perfectly well. The chief victims were poor kids. Rich kids had ­private educational resources that overcame this ideological deformity in learning.
Consider immigration. Australia, the US and Britain, too, are all immigrant societies. People rightly accept immigration well and all three societies are naturally welcoming to newcomers. But in each society the left thinks there is something illegitimate about the nation state, especially Western nation states. Therefore they believe the state has no right to control its borders. Thus in all three societies you got vast and uncontrolled illegal immigration. Some of the people who came in had great difficulty settling, but more generally the sheer numbers overwhelmed the society.
The people who suffered most were not the new-class, affluent, centre left political leaders, staffers, academics and bureaucrats. They live in insulated affluent suburbs. People in working class suburbs suffer the greatest ill effect of these policies in competition for entry level jobs and sometimes in crime rates.

Ah, the great replacement theory in action, so cue Nige looking silly in the usual Nige way, Nigel Farage.

The bromancer's real problem?

The chance to nuke the country to save the planet seems briefly lost, and all that's left is Barners howling into the net zero wind ...

And so to the last needy whine, and the absurdist - to the point of Dali surrealism - notion that any of the reptiles really give a flying fuck about the working class ...

What's the bet that climate science denialism will be amongst the final whines?

Consider government spending and inflation. The left thinks governments should always spend more on social programs. Many of these programs are ineffective or actually harmful, again because of the left’s fundamental misunderstandings about human nature.
But in purely economic terms, this spending always leads to big deficits and big inflation. Big deficits lead to huge interest bills, which is tax money that could be spent on something more useful. But the spending also always leads to inflation, which hurts poor ­people much more than it hurts wealthy people.
Consider the whole net zero green energy fantasy. As my colleague Chris Uhlmann described in The Weekend Australian on Saturday, there is no significant international movement to net zero. Fossil fuels account for about the same proportion of global energy as they have for decades.
But by taking net zero – which is essentially a fantasy concept, a typical ideological construct without application in the real world – seriously, centre left governments guarantee vastly higher energy prices. This hurts the poor in two obvious ways. They can’t afford higher energy prices. And the destruction of industry kills both entry level jobs and long term ­career jobs for non-university graduates.
Speaking of graduates, forgiving HECS debt is a classic anti-poor policy, because many more middle class kids go to uni than working class kids, and they ­generally receive higher incomes as a result.
There is really a left-wing war against the poor, evident in a thousand policy areas and big ideas that are bad ideas. Winning one election well does not remotely guarantee policy success. And left-wing policy failure always hurts the poor.

The pond concedes it was a truly pathetic outing, a sure sign that the reptiles are hurting, and feeling deeply wounded and ignored, but that's the way it often is on a Tuesday, and helps explain why the pond did its best to ignore them ... and so to wrap up proceedings with a Wilcox, showing the poor getting hurt ...