In which the pond tests whether His Lordship, or the Caterist, or the Major might trigger the bot ...

 

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

The pond was shocked, astonished and appalled to discover that the Google bot required age verification to access the pond's Sunday meditation.

Under no circumstances does the pond suggest anyone conform to this diktat. 

Reluctantly, and for amusement and entertainment purposes only, the pond has decided to run each of the Sunday reptiles daily in a 4.30 pm slot to see which one, if any, triggered the bot. 

The pond has its suspicions, but the answer will likely come slowly.

As alway in such situations, the pond recommends using a VPN - for example, Mullvad. It won't necessarily help in matters bot, but it helps with freedumb.

Meanwhile, the pond turned to the reptiles of the day, wondering if any of them would trigger the bot ...

Nothing to see there, just the reptiles reverting to Catholic Boys' Daily mode ...

EXCLUSIVE
Smoking gun: This scandal could bring the Vatican to its knees
The explosive discovery by the late George Pell and the Holy See’s first independent auditor-general of a secret accounting system ­risks a financial nuclear winter for the Vatican.
by Paoloa Totaro

There was one news item that might have triggered the bot ...

MEDIA DIARY
Explosive dossier details high-profile TV, sports stars forever indebted to Alan J**es
A confidential ledger threatens to drag some of the nation’s biggest names into the scandal surrounding the former broadcaster.
Steve Jackson

...but that's too tawdry and cheap for the pond, let alone a bot. (Sorry, the mere name might be enough to startle children).

The reptiles as usual resisted any mention of the ongoing Gaza genocide, so the pond decided to look over on the extreme far right to see if there was anything that might excite a bot ...

Could Lord Downer, going full rogue populist do the trick? 

After all, no child should be exposed to Lord Downer at any time ...

Sorry, it's a contractual requirement.

On with His Lordship...

The header: Why Javier Milei is today’s most exciting politician, Australia has been very well governed over the past century and a quarter. But we’re changing. We’re becoming distinctly Peronist.

The caption: Argentina's President Javier Milei, wearing a Polo helmet, gestures during the Argentine Rural Society's expo in Buenos Aires on July 26.

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

His Lordship was in full populist, demagogue mode ...

Someone recently asked me who was the most interesting political leader in the world today.
There’s no doubt President Donald Trump is interesting. He’s strong, he’s courageous but he’s something of an economic populist. Sadly, it’s obvious our own PM generates very little international excitement. For him, politics is a game, which he plays well. But no one out of Australia is inspired by his policies or convictions.
No, in many ways the most interesting leader today is President Javier Milei of Argentina.
For years, Argentina ran what was called the Peronist economic model, named after the political party founded by Juan Peron – husband of Evita. The Peronist model will be familiar to many Australians because we are increasingly applying it ourselves. It involves ever-increasing government expenditure on welfare, massive budget deficits, the empowerment of a select few trade union leaders, the propping up of companies and industries that don’t make money anymore, and increased taxes, particularly on industrious, creative entrepreneurs who make money producing goods and services that the public really want.
As always, the results of these policies were catastrophic. By 2023 Argentina’s annual inflation rate was over 200 per cent, it’s budget deficit 5 per cent of GDP, it had to borrow from the IMF because the government was unable to sell Argentine government bonds, the poverty rate in Argentina was over 50 per cent, and per capita GDP had been steadily declining for some years. In 2023 real incomes were lower than in 2007.

It's interesting that Lord Downer fudges the matter by saying King is strong and courageous, but an economic populist, and then calling Milei the "most interesting leader". 

That's completely ambivalent, a bit like calling S*t*n the "most interesting" of the fallen angels. (Sorry, the pond wants to make sure that nothing disturbs the bot).

To make sure we knew who Lord Downer was celebrating, the reptiles provided a snap, Argentine congressman and presidential candidate for the La Libertad Avanza Alliance, Javier Milei, greets supporters during the closure of his electoral campaign in Cordoba, Argentina.

His Lordship continued to be fascinated ...

So it was a pretty sad story, to say the least. A country rich in natural resources with a sophisticated population that had been, in per capita terms, one of the 10 richest countries in the world in 1900 was reduced to economic ruin by statism.
No one seemed to be able to do anything about it. Any suggested change to the economic model was fiercely opposed by the rent-seekers, and they were pervasive. But then something incredible happened. A candidate entered the 2023 election campaign called Javier Milei, an economist who promised to introduce a radical economically rational program to get the country back on its feet. Incredibly, the public decided that Milei was genuine and filled with enthusiastic conviction. They took a punt on him.
Milei promised big cuts to government expenditure, a massive program of deregulation, and a slashing of the power of vested interest groups such as major corporate and trade union leaders.
He promised the most fascinating liberal economic experiment the world has seen in a long time.
Now, just under two years later, we can see the results of this program. They make for fascinating reading and should be the focus of part of the debate at next month’s so-called productivity roundtable.
First, Milei cut government expenditure by a massive 30 per cent in his first year. That was the largest reduction in government expenditure in Argentina’s history. Those spending cuts included the phasing out of subsidies for energy and transport.
It also involved the abolition of many government departments, the reduction in the number of public servants employed, and some salary reductions for the surviving public servants. You can imagine how controversial that must have been. This year, Argentina is on track to achieve a budget surplus.

What set His Lordship off non this path? 

Why it was Killer of the IPA, 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.”

Now the pond doesn't intend to rain on his His Lordship's parade by linking to other stories, such as Josefina Salomon in Al Jazeera, Milei tames inflation, but Argentines still struggle to afford basics, In 1.5 years, Milei has radically cut inflation, but Argentina is one of the most expensive countries in Latin America

Argentina is now among the most expensive countries in Latin America, but it also has some of the lowest salaries.
While tackling inflation was essential to start fixing Argentina’s ailing economy, it’s proving not to be enough, experts say.
“Inflation isn’t everything,” Guido Zack, economy director at Fundar, a national think tank, told Al Jazeera. “Having a low inflation rate is important, but [in Argentina] the economic recovery has been very mixed among sectors of the economy and of the population. The majority of the population still has a low purchasing power, the rate of informal work has risen, and the poverty rate is still very high. There’s still a long way to go.”

And so on, but the pond doesn't want outside distractions to disturb the force or the bot ...

Second, reducing government expenditure has reduced dramatically the rate of inflation in Argentina. In 2023 the monthly inflation rate was around 25 per cent. By mid-2025 it was just over 2 per cent. Sure, that’s still too high but it’s a dramatic reduction in inflation. Reducing government expenditure has meant the central bank is no longer printing money.
The Milei government has also taken what it would like to call the chainsaw to government regulations. In one fell swoop it abolished some 300 government regulations. It liberalised labour laws making it easier not just to fire workers but to hire workers. It has begun to reform the tax system not just by reducing taxes but by simplifying the tax system, thereby making it more efficient. Added to that, it has privatised a number of government business enterprises.
Argentina has also liberalised its agricultural export industries and encouraged the extra extraction of cheap energy and minerals such as lithium.
What has all this done? It has led to an economic growth rate this year between 6 and 7 per cent. That, after years of economic decline, is a quite remarkable achievement. Investment is flowing back into Argentina, the government is now able to sell its bonds on the international markets. And living standards are starting to grow.
It’s true, Argentina still has a very high incidence of poverty, but what is interesting is this extraordinary experiment of economic liberalisation has actually led to a decline in the rate of poverty, not an increase in it. At the end of 2023, an estimated 57 per cent of Argentines lived in poverty. Today the poverty rate is still way too high at around 40 per cent but not only has it come down, it is continuing to decline.

His Lordship slipped in a form of billy goat buttism with his "'tis true", but then came a most unfortunate association, Elon Musk holds a chainsaw alongside Argentine President Javier Milei during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

That hasn't worked out well for Uncle Elon, what with the Starlink outage, the dismal quarterly earnings report, and novelty items such as Elon Musk opened a diner in Hollywood. What could go wrong? I went to find out.

His Lordship didn't worry about any of that, but did worry about going Peronist ...

President Milei, after all of this radical reform and having smashed the Peronist economic model that has pretty much wrecked the country, is being rewarded with surprisingly high public approval ratings. So what’s the moral of this story? It’s that economic liberalism is at the heart of growth, prosperity and national success.
As Milei said at the Davos economic forum to the top end of the global business community: “Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general wellbeing.” He went on to say “do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself”.
On the whole, Australia has been very well governed over the past century and a quarter. But we’re changing. We’re becoming distinctly Peronist. We’re into state control, state regulation, trade union power, endless government expenditure, big deficits, growing public debt: we’re starting to make all the mistakes that have been made over the past few decades in Argentina.
Yes, President Milei is the most interesting political leader in the world today. We should think about his words early this year: “The state has been used by organised groups … to get privileges that not only are unfair but also damage growth: protected ‘businessaurus’ and trade union scumbags.” Exactly.

What a loon he is, and if children don't need protection from all that, then nothing is sacred.

As the reptiles didn't mention it, perhaps now is the time to catch up via an infallible Pope...

By way of contrast, the reptiles were in full climate science denialist banquet mode with the Caterist ...

The header: Coalition take note: WA Libs know what to do with net zero, The cautionary tale of British energy company Drax illustrates the reality of a marginal reduction in emissions that hardly justifies the cost.

There was a caption, but the mysterious invitation to go elsewhere went missing: The Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire was responsible for 14 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2024, according to the climate think-tank Ember.

The pond doesn't want to agitate the bot, but did spend time on the weekend reading Yasmin Tayag in The Atlantic, Climate Change Is Doing a Number on People's Summertime Blues (archive link):

America’s summer quandary—suffer inside or out?—will become only more persistent as climate change intensifies. In the United States, heat waves have grown more frequent and intense every decade since the 1960s. During a single heat wave last month, people in 29 states were warned to stay inside to avoid dangerously high temperatures. All of the experts I spoke with expressed concerns about the impacts of escalating heat on mental health. “I am not optimistic,” Ayman Fanous, a psychiatry professor at the University of Arizona, told me, noting that heat also has a well-established link with suicide risk and can exacerbate mental-health conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and substance abuse. Many Americans don’t have access to air conditioning, or they work jobs that require them to be outside in the heat. Those who can stay cool inside may avoid the most severe consequences but still end up miserable for half of the year.

And so on, and so to the Caterist ...

The Drax energy company boasts that it is the UK’s largest source of renewable energy. Which is curious, since its key asset, Drax Power Station, is the most carbon-intensive generator in the country.
The story of Drax serves as a cautionary tale for Australia, as it grapples with the contradictions of net zero. However well-intentioned the UN’s climate change initiative may have been, the process has been deeply corrupted by rent-seeking, regulatory capture and creative accounting.
Nonsensical rules, such as the one that allows Drax’s carbon footprint to disappear, are ruthlessly exploited by corporations marketing themselves as champions of a low-cost, green energy future.
Governments participate in this scam because every tonne of emissions saved is something to boast about, whether the savings are real or not. The climate-obsessed elite have no desire to start tugging at loose threads, perhaps out of the fear that the whole suit of clothes will unravel.
At the start of the century, Drax was the largest coal-fired power station in Europe, in dire need of a refit in which no one was willing to invest.
In 2006, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reaffirmed an earlier ruling that burning biofuel is carbon neutral. It was followed by a European directive that bioenergy would be reclassified as renewable and therefore eligible for subsidies.
Drax changed its business model from an energy producer to a subsidy sponge. It converted its boiler to run on wood pellets and established a supply chain in the US and Canada. Drax invested in string of processing plants where offcuts, low-grade timber and other organic matter were compressed and dried.
The pellets are trucked to North American ports, loaded on to bulk-carriers, shipped to ports in northern England and loaded on to trains (diesel-hauled, if you care to ask).
In his 2010 book, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, historian EA Wrigley concludes that the shift from a wood-burning organic economy to a coal-burning mineral economy was the enabler of industrial progress and prosperity.

Cue a snap designed to irritate the reptiles, The storage of the wood pellets for a biomass power plant. Picture: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

That triggered the Caterist ...

Harvesting wood for fuel is land-intensive and competes with agriculture. Wood and biomass are bulky, inefficient and regionally constrained. They are prone to economic bottlenecks.
“In an organic economy, growth carries with it the seeds of its demise,” Wrigley writes.
None of those constraints have disappeared. Wood pellets are bulky. They have less than half the energy density of coal by volume, which means Drax needs to be fed with around 17 trainloads a day to produce around 2GW of electricity.
Burning wood is hardly clean. Drax was responsible for 14 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2024, according to the climate think-tank Ember.
Yet these emissions are wiped from the slate under international carbon accounting rules. CO2 released from biofuel is not counted against the UK’s emissions total because it is notionally reabsorbed by regrowth forests in the US and Canada.
There are more ridiculous ways to power a modern economy, and those, too, are plied up with subsidies to make the business case stack up. The most valuable subsidy is the granting of Renewable Obligation Certificates, which can be sold on the open market for £50 ($102.50) to £60 each. In 2023, Drax earned 42 per cent of its total revenue from selling ROCs and 58 per cent the old-fashioned way by selling electricity.
Australia’s embrace of net zero is following a similar path: grand pronouncements, bureaucratic frameworks, and market distortions that reward the appearance of decarbonisation over its reality. We should not be surprised at such glaring anomalies. What did we expect would emerge from a scheme framed by bureaucrats, twisted by governments for competitive advantage, expropriated by politicians for moral virtue, and gamed relentlessly by big energy and big finance?
Did we really imagine that this top-down masterplan for a new economy would succeed, when every previous attempt has failed? It is one thing for left-wing governments to fall for the intellectual conceit that the state should override decentralised decision-making to achieve a chosen social objective.

Never mind the planet, feel the reptile rage, Australia’s embrace of net zero is following a similar path: grand pronouncements, bureaucratic frameworks, and market distortions that reward the appearance of decarbonisation over its reality. Picture: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

And so to the last of the Caterist, playing by Barners' rules ...

Conservatives, however, should know better. Conservatism starts with the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed but not easily created.
It puts them at a disadvantage in civic debate, since, as Roger Scruton pointed out, the work of destruction is quick and exhilarating while the work of creation is slow, laborious and dull. The conservative position is true but boring, while that of its opponents is exciting but false.
In few public policy areas does this aphorism sound the alarm bell more loudly than in the emotionally charged sphere of climate and energy. A politician with a masterplan for a cleaner economy delivering cheaper energy and skies filled with butterflies has an easier sell than one who is cautious about abandoning technology that has blessed humankind with unprecedented growth over the past three centuries.
Yet the conservatives’ lot in life is to embrace the unexciting, even if that means cutting across the grain of conventional wisdom, as it usually does in an era where progressive liberal ideas predominate in politics, academia and the media. Their consolation is that they will eventually be proved right, as those who prioritise empirical evidence and real-world experience over sentiment and theory always are.
The WA Liberal Party’s decision to reject net zero at the weekend’s State Council meeting will doubtless make life difficult for the opposition in the short term. Yet this issue goes beyond factional interplay to the question of honesty and character. Almost four years after the Coalition signed up to net zero, the notion that the target can be achieved is no less fanciful. The marginal reduction in emissions hardly justifies the cost.
We are no more confident that other countries will play by the rules and absorb the inherent risks of the great energy transition. The technologies in which we have invested so much hope, such as green hydrogen, have not matured. They are no more economically and technically feasible than they were in 2021.
Popular support for wind, solar, pumped hydro and batteries has crumbled, particularly in rural Australia, where the impact of industrial-scale wind, solar, high-voltage cables and battery parks is most keenly felt.
There is no pain-free way of resolving these glaring contradictions in the policy that the Coalition took to the last election. Yet it cannot be avoided. The longer the Coalition leaves the question of net zero hanging, the harder it will be.

At this point, before proceeding on to the Major, the pond would often mention other reading, such as Tr**p Adviser Warns Stephen C*lb*rt Is Just the Beginning.

But what if such names triggered the bot?

How to cope with Timothy W. Ryback's What Happened When H***** Took On Germany's Central Banker.?

The parallels with the present day are obvious, but you can see the chilling effect a bot can have.

The pond had to resort to the same tactic when referencing Mike Lofgren's piece for Salon, David Br**ks faces the truth of US history - and runs away, NY T**mes' pet conservative offers a lengthy apologia for America - and gets pretty much everything wrong.

And yet surely above all it's the Major who should be banned from impressionable vulgar youff ...

The header: Labor has clear mandate for reform – now it’s up to Albo & Jim to show some courage,  With a fractured Coalition at historic lows, will Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers prefer the politically safe route of their past three years or risk political capital to do what is right for Australia? Here’s what they should do.

Again the mysterious invitation to go elsewhere was nowhere to be seen, and all that was left was the caption: Treasurer Jim Chalmers views the scene as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks during question time in the House of Representatives last week. Picture: AAP Image/Lukas Coch

As always the pond was pleased by the Major sparing the time from a round of golf to drop in for a five minute read, but it turned out that he was just going to do a Peronist variant:

History will judge Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers harshly if they waste their mandate on the sort of timid policy agenda that defined their first term.
Albanese’s May 3 election win was a landslide. He picked up 62.7 per cent of seats in the lower house; on the Labor side, only John Curtin in 1943 did better with 49 of the then 75 seats or 65.3 per cent, according to former ABC election analyst Antony Green.
John Howard won 63.5 per cent of the seats for the Coalition in the 1996 poll, and Malcolm Fraser in 1977 secured 69.4 per cent.
Albanese won with small tax cuts for all, subsidies for rising electricity bills, a pledge to lift bulk-billing rates and a promise to reduce HECS debt. Essentially, voters believed Labor would give them more free stuff than the Coalition.
Only now are economics writers admitting the HECS pledge is regressive, giving more to high income earners in law and medicine.
Health Department advice published in The Australian on July 21 says Albanese’s $8.2 billion boost to lift bulk billing will not meet its targets.
On March 23, this column said doctors rather than patients would be the big winners: “The policy will save patients $895 million a year by 2030 at a cost to the government of $2.5 billion a year.”
To that, add Labor’s plan for universal childcare that extends subsidies to families earning up to $530,000 per annum at a possible cost of more than $20 billion a year.
Tight targeting of welfare was a cherished principle of Labor’s Hawke-Keating reform era. Not so for Chalmers.

Naturally there has to be a villain, Treasurer Jim Chalmers speaking last week. ‘The truth is neither side of politics has offered voters a genuine plan to lift living standards,’ writes Chris Mitchell. ‘And they do need lifting, given living standards rose only 1.5 per cent here over the past decade compared with 22 per cent in comparably wealthy nations.’ Picture: Tara Croser.

The Major did a little both siderism, with neither side satisfying him ...

As the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s cost blows out to $52 billion a year and Labor finds itself unable to cut immigration, the prospects of economic improvement look dim. This year’s budget forecast another decade of deficits.
The Australian Financial Review on Wednesday carried an analysis by the Centre for Independent Studies showing state and federal government payments make up the majority of income for more than half of all voters.
CIS report author Robert Carling wrote: “A culture of dependency and entitlement has taken root in the population and political behaviour has become only too willing to accommodate and encourage it in a feedback loop.”
On top of this, the fact that four out of every five new jobs last year were in the public sector or government-underwritten care sector only makes improving productivity more difficult.
Business and journalists are assessing possible paths to improved productivity in the lead-up to the economic reform summit Chalmers has called in Canberra on August 19-21.
Productivity that used to average growth of more than two per cent a year in the Hawke, Keating and Howard years has been languishing at 1.2 per cent for the past 15 years. As Professor Richard Holden said in the AFR on July 20, at 2.5 per cent growth in productivity, living standards double every 28 years but rise only by a third with productivity growth at 1 per cent.
Most business lobby groups are invited to the summit, as are representatives from the ACTU, Productivity Commission and Treasury. Housing expert Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, competition and energy policy bureaucrat Kerry Schott, Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn and Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar will be there.
Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, author of the 2010 tax reform paper, will also attend. But most of Australia’s big miners will not and some fear their absence signals an interest in rekindling Henry’s super profits tax, which triggered the downfall of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Whereas Keating was brave enough to champion a GST at the Hawke economic summit of April 1983, Chalmers does not want to talk about lifting the GST and is likely to push back on reining in spending, which across all levels of government was 38.34 per cent of GDP last year compared with just under 30 per cent in 1990.
Business fears a repeat of the ambush by Labor and its trade union base that defined the Jobs and Skills summit of September 2022 with a plan to re-regulate the labour market.
This time business worries the agenda is less about productivity than lifting taxes. It fears the Treasurer’s plan to tax unrealised gains in superannuation funds with balances of more than $3 million signals Chalmers’ desperation for revenue.
Not enough journalists wrote it, but the truth is neither side of politics has offered voters a genuine plan to lift living standards. And they do need lifting, given living standards rose only 1.5 per cent here over the past decade compared with 22 per cent in comparably wealthy nations.
Only a $400bn unbudgeted windfall from the mining boom has allowed Australia to sail through without structural change.
As Paul Kelly wrote in The Australian on Wednesday, the size of Labor’s win creates demands for a much stronger prosperity agenda: “The story of Labor’s governing success, whether John Curtin, (Gough) Whitlam, Bob Hawke or Paul Keating has been the ability of such leaders to reach outside Labor orthodoxy.”

Oh dear, clearly neither the Major nor nattering "Ned" managed to read our Henry's withering denunciation of John Curtin and his government, or is that why the reptiles this day went with other pollies? Then prime minister Bob Hawke watching on as then treasurer Paul Keating delivers the federal budget at Parliament House in 1986. Picture: NCA

The pond couldn't help but think the Major sounded a bit glum about all this, more years of ranting and railing, and yet to what avail? 

Just endless more of the same, climate science denialism given the obligatory mention, when really the best answer might be to join King Donald doing a round or two ...

With a fractured Coalition at historic lows and likely to be in opposition for several terms, will Albanese and Chalmers prefer the politically safe route of their past three years or risk political capital to do what is right for Australia?
If Chalmers hopes to emulate Keating and follow Albanese into the prime ministership as part of a long term Labor government, he will need to do better than his first term.
He will need to implement real tax reform to revive individual incentive.
He should cut corporate taxation – now higher than in comparable countries – to lift much needed private sector investment.
He should tackle entrenched taxation disincentives that are favouring the wealthy already in the housing market at the expense of the young. He is correct to tackle superannuation concessions that favour the rich.
Even Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey acknowledged that back in 2014, but Labor should ditch taxing unrealised gains.
Chalmers needs to cut government spending and streamline planning approvals for important national projects.
He will need to improve the productivity of the very trade unions that benefited from his previous summit. That looked problematic on Friday when this newspaper led on a story of ACTU leader Sally McManus criticising private sector bosses for poor productivity and claiming workers needed more time off.
Labor also needs to be honest about its energy transition and Future Made in Australia plans. Nothing will be made in Australia if power prices keep rising. Chalmers should be frank about the importance of exports of coal, iron ore, gas and uranium that are making China and India rich.
Hucksters in business and fools in media spruik green hydrogen and green steel, neither of which exist now.
Real political leaders need to ensure they do nothing to damage the very resource exports that have saved Australia.
This column reckons it’s unlikely this government is up to any of these hard reforms. But if it is it will need a new media strategy.
Empathising on podcasts and social media about how tough life is won’t sell hard reform to voters who think they have elected a government that hands out free money.

Indeed, indeed, and so to close proceedings with a reminder that Alan J*n*s isn't the only parrot out there who can play a TV host ...