In which the pond takes Alex, fellow from Ming land, straight, before moving on to the lesser member of the Kelly gang and Roger of The Times...

 

Thursday is always the worst day of the lizard Oz week.

Pond correspondents rightly refuse to contemplate spending time with petulant Peta, but even when she goes MIA, there's little joy to be found ...

Contemplate the "news" for a nanosecond ...

The reptiles are diligent, the pond will give them that. In their never-ending quest to roast the government, they rolled out 'red tape' and cardigan wearer fat cats as their lead, as vintage as the 'faceless men' routine of yore, while down below they held out hope that the greenies would aid them in their super war against super changes.

Meanwhile, The Australian Zionist Daily News was outraged, outraged they tells ya, not at the bombs falling on Gaza, but by a bombshell...

ARTS
Biennale bombshell: creative licence on show as Burke backs ‘terror’ image artist
Arts Minister Tony Burke has strongly backed the reinstatement of two anti-Israel artists to represent the nation at the Venice Biennale following Creative Australia’s stunning about-face.
By Rosemary Neill and Rhiannon Down

Only in the reptiles' lunchtime.

There's not many freedumbs in the world, at least in the reptile hive mind.

Over on the extreme far right, The Australian Zionist Daily News also hosted a commentary piece ...

Court rips away veil on jihadi preacher’s hateful rhetoric
People are free to engage in robust debate about international conflicts, whether their beliefs are true or false, informed or ignorant. But that does not include the freedom to mobilise racism as a polemic tool to promote one’s views.
By Peter Wertheim

Pity the mad Mullahs haven't learned to lobby ABC management like some have. You know, mobilise Islamophobia to get someone kicked off air for daring to mention the ethnic cleansing currently going down.

Who else was over on the extreme far right? Give a little dance of joy that petulant Peta's not there, and then read on ...

With the greatest lack of interest the pond could muster, this was top of the Oz digital world ma?

Losing one side of politics may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

The pond is well over that feud, but if push came to shove, the pond would rather be reading Paul Krugman on substack, with Muskenfreude, When an oligarch confronts an autocrat, guess who wins?

The pond much preferred Muskenfreude to a lame recycling of an Oscar Wilde quote ripped from The Importance of Being Earnest ...

Eric was also on hand to give Qantas a hard time, but Golding did that job much more succinctly ...

Meanwhile, Alex, fellow from Ming land, managed to overlook the determined attempt by early colonists to wipe out pesky, difficult, uppity blacks ...

Yoorrook inquiry is pushing politics, not truthful history
Genocide is an accusation of the highest order. Beyond the immediate calls for compensation, it fundamentally shapes our grasp of history and the very freedom to discuss its interpretations.
By Alex McDermott

It turns out that Alex is a wannabe Henry, and initially the pond thought just a sample stripped of visual distractions would do ... but why not go the full hog?

Yoorrook Justice Commission’s vice-chair Travis Lovett recently walked 500km from Portland in western Victoria to Victoria’s Parliament House to deliver the final report of the nation’s first formal truth-telling process. Greeted by an enthusiastic crowd on the Spring Street steps, Lovett declared that “the silence ends here. The time of not knowing – of choosing not to know – is over.”
Yoorrook means “truth” in the Wemba Wemba language of northwest Victoria. The four-year inquiry – the longest ever with the power of a royal commission in Victoria’s history – collected thousands of witnesses’ statements and prompted 16 ministerial apologies. The final report, “Truth Be Told”, tabled this week in parliament, purports to tell the true story of colonisation, which it unequivocally describes as genocide.
Genocide is an accusation of the highest order. Beyond the immediate calls for compensation, it fundamentally shapes our grasp of history and the very freedom to discuss its interpretations.
Regardless, Premier Jacinta Allan has welcomed the report, describing the “truth-telling process” as “a historic opportunity to hear the stories of our past that have been buried”.
But if Allan and the commissioners believe Indigenous history is enveloped in a pall of silence, they need to get out more.

 How the reptiles love to savage pesky difficult uppity blacks - it's part of the colonial experience - but it turned out thatAlex's notion of getting out more really meant keeping him company as his bashing quickly devolved into one of those endless litanies that the reptile hive mind loves ...

No need to grace this form of rant with distracting snaps, just feel the ooze ...

...The national curriculum, its state versions, and every Australian university history department have become a cacophony, dedicated to topics they deem to have been shamefully muted.
Museums, state libraries and art galleries have made Indigenous experience a mainstay of their exhibitions, alongside other ­minorities and women. Just a few days ago, Melbourne University’s Potter Museum of Art launched an exhibition on Indigenous art that its curator proudly describes as consciously and deliberately “anti-colonial”.

At the same time, social progressive separatism – in the form of multiculturalism and Indigenous self-determination – has become unquestionable orthodoxy. To challenge them publicly means professional ostracism.
Reflecting that, the Australian curriculum, particularly within Civics and Citizenship and Humanities and Social Sciences, foregrounds the experiences of minorities, often over the common, shared experiences of most Australians. It is through the lens of identity politics, which relentlessly divides society into smaller and smaller groups, that students are encouraged to engage with contemporary political and social issues.
As these preoccupations have become dominant, Australia’s ­national student assessments (NAP-CC) have found an ongoing, now accelerating, collapse in civic knowledge and understanding, the critical foundations of democratic citizenship.
This knowledge collapse is particularly acute in key areas: constitutional structure, the head of state’s role, referendums, and ­pivotal historical events, especially those linked to British ­institutions.

Even in 2004, the baseline was pitifully low. Only half of Year 6 students and 39 per cent of Year 10s met basic standards, as a ­majority struggled with “iconic knowledge” such as the history and significance of the Australian flag and of Anzac Day.
Since then, results have only worsened. Today, a mere 43 per cent of Year 6 students and 28 per cent of Year 10 students achieve proficiency.
Australia’s democratic identity has always been primarily attitudinal, locked into its cultural DNA, rather than grounded in a deeply felt recognition of the ­nation’s pivotal moments.
Unlike the US with its Declaration of Independence or France with its Republican fervour, our political milestones – convicts gaining equal justice in 1788, early self-government and franchise in the 1850s, or the direct vote for ­nationhood achieved in 1901 – have never made the Aussie heart beat faster.

Really? Don't we share the same values? Don't our hearts beat at the same rate?

On with the litany ...

But we at least tried to ensure students knew about them. Moreover, school civics celebrated British achievements – individual liberty, Magna Carta, the rule of law – as our own, which of course they were. Until the 1970s, the British thread in our school curriculum told a clear story: the hard-won fight for political rights through British history, making Australia’s own democratic strides instantly recognisable.
Since then, the emphasis has changed dramatically. What we now celebrate are the victories of the excluded – women’s suffrage, the 1967 referendum – and rightly so. But what about the central trunk of that story, the very foundation from which these branches of increasing inclusion extend? That trunk is gone.
As historian John Hirst, who chaired the “Discovering Democracy” civics program under the Howard government, bitterly noted, in losing our British heritage, our very sense of ourselves as Australian citizens has paradoxically weakened. We’ve shredded everything that united us and replaced it with anything that shoves us apart.
The result is not a culture of forgetting, where past sins are denied. It is a culture of ignorance. It derides at best, denies at worst, the past achievements that make it possible to recognise democratic deficiencies and seek to address them. We have, in other words, created a civic vacuum, too easily filled by climate activism, or anti-racism initiatives that can morph into poisonous anti-Semitism, all dominated by an ideology of protest and post-colonial revolt.
We are no longer Britons, of course. But must we also disown our genuine civic heritage? The political traditions and achievements stretching back to Magna Carta? Yes, there is a pall of ­silence: it hangs over our national culture. The authentic origins and deep roots of who we are remains not just unspoken but unspeakable.
Even after the decisive repudiation of the politics of difference in the voice referendum, and with figures like Jacinta Nampinjimpa Price articulating a more concrete politics of equality than any politician since John Howard, we seem to remain bewitched.
Bewitched and bewildered, by the constant repetition of claims that bear no relation to the reality of history. Surely, after more than 50 years, it’s time to shatter the real silence and reclaim our full civic story.
Alex McDermott is a fellow at the Robert Menzies Institute.

A fellow? A colonial chap? 

What a prize maroon, able enough to assemble the usual reptile talking points, be they "climate activism", or loving mass starvation as a military tactic, or celebrating the Price is Right, but mute on other matters ...

Good one Alex, but that's more than enough Ming the Merciless style claptrap. 

Roll on Friday and an appearance by the true master, always willing to trot out Thucydides as a reminder of what made the British empire grate.

The pond got so desperate that it went off page and dived beneath the fold to discover Joe, the lesser member of the Kelly Gang, now feeling his oats as "Washington correspondent":

Joe was ever so keen that we tug the forelock, bend the knee and kiss the ring: Wong’s dead-bat diplomacy a mistake, Penny Wong’s visit to Washington shows that Australia is gambling it can manage the Trump 2.0 era without making major concessions – a position fraught with risk.

The caption was as deadening as the text that followed: Foreign Minister Penny Wong meets her American counterpart Marco Rubio in Washington Picture: Getty Images

Again with the exotic advice: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Penny Wong’s trip to Washington is a symbol of Australia’s dead-bat game plan in dealing with the Trump administration.
The Albanese government’s diplomacy is marked by no sense of public initiative or urgency – only a passive acceptance that America’s role in world affairs is changing.
The gamble is that Australia can skate through without shifting its approach. Such timidity will fail to deliver the outcomes the country needs during the Trump era.
It stands in contrast to the attitude of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who sounded a call to action on Tuesday, arguing that he wanted the Quad to achieve more “concrete” results.
The transactional dynamics of the Trump administration require nations to embrace action and upheaval while striking deals and leveraging the power of relationships.
Yet Australia appears deterred and uncertain about how to advance the partnership with America at a time when Washington has increased its expectations of allies.
Earlier this year, the government failed to leverage a critical minerals deal to win an exemption from Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and it now faces demands to lift defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP as well as a snap review of the AUKUS agreement.
After a day of meetings with her Quad counterparts, Wong made a number of cautious statements that pointed to the thinking of the Labor government.
First, it does not believe America is as reliable under Trump. Pressed on this question, Wong said: “We understand that President Trump has a different view of how America is to be in the world. We respect that.”
She said the strategic partnership remained “deep”, “trusting” and “to the benefit of both nations”. This qualifies as an endorsement, but does not signal the usual Australian confidence in the alliance.
Second, the Pentagon’s 30-day review of AUKUS is a major blind spot and Wong cannot give any guarantee the agreement will continue in its current form.
“This is a review which is still in the process of being undertaken. We will provide information to that review as and when requested,” she said.
This comment suggests there has been no engagement with the Pentagon so far. It also leaves open the prospect of the review – led by Elbridge Colby – imposing further hurdles and conditions on Australia.

As if anyone could be anything other than cautious around King Donald, a fickle monarch always indulging his narcissism and his whims.

As if the King won't do whatever his mood dictates.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, but the pond couldn't be bothered inserting the image of Ms Wong. 

Just the text will do, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong has spoken after a meeting with her Quad counterparts in Washington, DC. “The issue of Australia’s defence budget was not raised with me, either in the Quad or in my bilateral meeting,” Ms Wong said. “What we did discuss is a number of areas of co-operation that we want to see more concrete outcomes in, critical minerals is one of them, maritime security is another.”

Then Joe carried on with his listicle ...

Third, the government is weak on identifying Beijing as a threat. Asked whether it was, Wong said China was a “great power”.
“It is asserting its influence using all aspects of national power,” she said. “The challenge for Australia and for other countries is that one can see where those interests differ from Australia’s interests.”
Fourth, Australia will not increase defence spending simply because it is demanded by the US and, finally, Labor is sensitive about the failure of Anthony Albanese to line up a meeting with Trump.
“I think the world understood the President had a fair bit to do … given what was occurring in the Middle East,” she said. “We are working together on rescheduling the meeting.”
The government is in a holding pattern and calculates that it can manage the US President primarily through an Australian political lens.
It is banking on the US President’s unpopularity at home to insulate it from any pushback it receives from Washington. Leaning into this approach may have worked during the recent election campaign, but it is now a mistake.
If the trend continues, it may weaken the alliance over the longer term. Worse still, it could invite a more serious rupture in relations or a reassessment in Washington about Australia itself.
This will concern most Australians who grasp the difference between the volatility of the current administration and the enduring value of the alliance, the US defensive shield and nuclear umbrella.

Sheesh, whatever happened to nattering "Ned"? 

Did they settle on Joe just to make the pond yearn for that verbiage Everest to return?

More on that shield and its usefulness to Ukraine below, but really the pond just wanted to run Joe as an excuse for this day's infallible Pope, with Ms Wong sheltering in place below a picture of the monarch...

And then the pond did another dive below the fold to discover Roger of The Times...

The header: Cracks in the Crinks play into Trump’s hands, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are Marvel comic super-villains who seem determined to end Captain America’s grip on the world. But now Russia and China have turned their backs on Iran, Xi is spying on Putin and Kim feels bruised.

The caption: The Crinks were already in trouble even before American bombs hit the Fordow nuclear lair.

The pond hasn't yet taken to inserting "gravy" into every second word to fuck with the AI bots, but just look at that AI mush, that slush, that slop, that visual stodge, that the reptiles served up as decoration for Roger of The Times...

Just look at the way The Times presented Roger a few days ago  (*archive link) before the lizards of Oz reheated him, and dressed him up in their tawdry, wretched clothes ...

See what the reptiles did with their bait clicking ways? This bot bait leapt to the top ...

Marvel gravy comic super-villains who seem determined to end Captain gravy America’s gravy grip on the world. 

Never mind, on with the text ...

A warm glow still emanates from the US security establishment. For once there is some consensus: America’s big beast bunker-busters have severely wounded Iran’s nuclear programme. The difficult, tough-nut Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu has been encouraged and praised throughout the bombing campaign, but also subtly reminded of his junior role. A hand-up has been given to Mohammed bin Salman and his ambitions to turn a modern Saudi Arabia into a US-backed regional leader. All this, without the spilling of American blood in a messy forever war.

Um, is that the man who cheerfully butchered a journalist and is as offensive as any of the other dictators in the region?

The reptiles didn't offer an answer, because they were keen to insert into Roger's text a reliable gif they've run time and again...

Sheesh, get over it reptiles... that's the umpteenth time, and that's enough already. 

Back to Roger of The Times... and the war with China, a notion designed to have the bromancer dance with joy ... and giving the reptiles their Marvel cue ...

But for team Trump, the 12-day scrap was always about more than fixing the Middle East. It was about clearing the decks, creating global room for manoeuvre in the coming stand-off with China. The resolution of that multi-layered conflict with Beijing will be the true measure of Donald Trump’s success.
What counts now is not the number of years Tehran will take to get close to a nuclear arsenal but rather spurring on the collapse of confidence within the Crinks. That’s China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, the Marvel comic super-villains who seem determined to end what they see as Captain America’s grip on all corners of the world.
Fact is, the Crinks were already in trouble even before American bombs hit the Fordow nuclear lair. Russia, once desperate for Iranian Shahed 136 combat drones for its war against Ukraine, now produces them in Russia without Tehran’s help. Russian military bloggers are contemptuous of Iranian assistance: a batch of Iranian Fath-360 missiles was delivered last autumn but appears not to have been deployed yet in Ukraine.

The last the pond checked the sociopathic voice of Russian state media, Vladimir Solovyov, was calling for the immediate bombing of Europe (YouTube).

He's going soft. A bombing? Not so long ago he was all in on a nuking.

Speaking of a good nuking and Marvel Comics and the good old days, remember when the Ruskis were the super villains in every comic and movie doing the rounds...

At this point the reptiles interrupted with a snap, Russia frets that China is building influence in Siberia and the Arctic while Russia was distracted by a full-on war in Ukraine. Picture: Vyacheslav Prokofyev/ AFP

Russia frets? 

Don't they have King Donald as a loyal and faithful ally, always eager to help out?

Please allow the pond to take a detour into Phillips P. O'Brien's substack, "Daddy" Just Accelerated The Killing Of Ukrainians

It never works out—never.
The latest iteration of “Trump will be good for Ukraine” lasted three days, but sadly this might have been the most tragic. We have had a number of such moments over the last months. My favorite (in a horrifying way) was the famous Trump-Zelensky sit down in St Peters during the funeral of Pope Francis. For some reason, this picture led people to believe that Trump was honestly going to help Ukraine.
Trump did what he always does after such meetings. Make a bland pro-Ukrainian/anti-Russian statement and then goes back to Washington and continues to help Putin as much as possible. In case you do not remember, the statement Trump made after the St Peter’s meeting was a question that ‘Maybe he (Putin) doesn’t want to stop the war’.
It was meaningless, self-evidently true, committed Trump to nothing—and quickly forgotten.
Btw, this happened on April 26.
We had another re-run this last weekend during the “Daddy” summit. After European leaders massaged Trump with vigor, the US president threw them a little crumb (which people weirdly thought was some great victory). In response to a question, Trump said he was thinking of sending Ukraine more air defense. The actual quote was: “We’re going to see if we can make some available”.
Well, it did not take two weeks for this nonsense to be exposed—just two days. It turns out that the US Department of Defense, at that very moment, was working to turn off as much of the remaining aid taps for Ukraine as they could—including the exact air-defense equipment that Trump mentioned. Last night the White House confirmed that the US was stopping some/all of the remaining (Biden-era) shipments of aid to Ukraine including crucial Patriot air defense systems (and other vital material).

This is a shopping list of much of the most important aid that Ukraine desperately needs to fight and without which many more Ukrainians will die. The nightly bombardment of Ukrainian cities will now be more effective for Russia, and the Ukrainian ability to strike back on the Russians will be lessened.
Just as a clarification—not only are the Patriots a crucial part of the Ukrainian air defense network, AIM-7 (Sparrow) missiles and Stingers are further key parts of the Ukrainian air defense network.
If Putin could write a wish list of the weapons he would want Trump to keep from Ukraine—this would be it.
The idea that the US needs these now is also a sham. Many of these weapons would be of dubious value in a war to protect Taiwan (and btw, the US is hardly planning for one I was recently told).
Now this decision may be revisited one the sham “assessments” are over. However even if that happens, Ukraine will have had weeks without vital supplies.
Its one more example of how the Trump administration is taking active steps to help Russia kill Ukrainians...

And so on, at the link, where the reading concluded thusly ...

...When a Russian missile slams into a Ukrainian apartment building tomorrow night or the next, and a young couple, maybe with a newborn child, is killed, just remember:
This is “Daddy” in action—this is the USA in action.

Well yes, but the pond should get back to Roger of The Times and his ongoing fit of trumphalism ...

Iran is plainly the most dodgy member of the axis of evil, a liability. China and Russia make their own calculations, reassessing perhaps whether a nuclear-armed Iran enhances their collective potential to disrupt or drags them into an utterly unpredictable all-out war. If the clerical state collapses, its failure will end the illusion that the Crink club is in some way a collective security arrangement. Iran’s do-or-die choice now - whether to make a secret dash to weaponise what remains of its nuclear programme - wouldn’t just threaten the West. It would trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and deeply compromise China and Russia as would-be global players.
North Korea too is being sidelined in the Gotterdammerung of the Crinks - just study Kim Jong-un’s tear-swollen face this week. He was watching footage of himself laying flags on the coffins of North Korean troops killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine. Perhaps he was commiserating with the families of the fallen - 15,000 North Korean soldiers have been sent into Russia’s war - but more likely he was crying tears of humiliation. Despite sending millions of artillery rounds to Russia, he has so far received in return only body bags, a hug from Vladimir Putin and some Russian help in modernising air defence.

At this point the reptiles inserted a snap which once would have acted as a convenient trigger, Troops saluting on tanks during a military parade to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Korean People's Revolutionary Army at Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang in 2022. Picture: KCNA via KNS/AFP

That sort of image has lost its potency as a trigger when every second rate dictator at the head of a banana republic can bung on a parade ...

And so to a final gobbet of Roger of The Times...

Kim wanted more. Carefully edited film of his trips to arms factories in North Korea and Russia shows what he really expected from the Kremlin: Russian help in building a supersonic cruise missile, AI-equipped suicide drones, air-to-air missiles. The whole world is cranking up its war economies and Kim wanted to be part of the show. Instead, when he rushed to launch a second destroyer in May, the ship capsized. A dozen officials were promptly arrested.
This axis of evil is being reduced to its core, China and Russia. And they too are at odds. A recently leaked planning document from the FSB, the security service, set out how Russian counterintelligence should deal with a surging Chinese spying effort. Beijing, it said, was looking to gather information about how Russia was dealing with a western-backed army, how drone warfare tactics were changing, the modernisation of software and the damaging potential of long-range western weapons.
China was on the hunt, said the nine-page paper, for former Russian pilots and engineers. Russia frets that China, despite swearing an oath of limitless friendship with Moscow, is building influence in Siberia and the Arctic while Russia was distracted by a full-on war in Ukraine.
Even limitless friends can spy on each other of course; it may even be the secret of a happy marriage. But stories about Chinese hacking of the Russian military establishment suggest core-Crink is confused and consumed by doubt.
If China’s biggest looming geopolitical challenge is a perceived independence push by Taiwan then it needs to overhaul its variously rehearsed battle plans. There have been multiple lessons from the current wars - Trump’s readiness to mount a jaw-dropping, one-off preventive attack that stops just short of an act of war, closer US supervision of Taiwan’s AI-enhanced drone fleet - and Beijing needs to game the risks. What new weapons systems does China need for an offshore war? Can it penetrate the Taiwanese army as deeply as the Israelis wormed inside the brains of the Iranian military?
These sensitive questions seem to demand a new approach to war - hence perhaps Xi Jinping’s purge of parts of the top brass including the recently arrested General He Weidong, former commander of the Eastern theatre. If nothing else, this shake-up suggests high-anxiety regime stress, part of the Trumpian everyday. Western allies try desperately to second-guess Trump. China and Russia meanwhile seem not to trust each other in their separate dealings with Trump. It is becoming a free-for-all, a meltdown of the blocs.
The Times

And that talk of a free for all allows the pond to segue to the immortal Rowe for the closing 'toon of the day...

Is there no end to the way he can conjure up King Donald in all his finery and his tatts?