In which our Henry nukes 'em all ...

Some newbie reptile readers might get distracted by the latest reptile jihad ...

... but the pond is canny. 

Where some readers might have been beguiled by the big splash offered up by the Rice is wrong ...

ANALYSIS
Why has mainstream media shrunk from reporting one of the most important legal cases of 2025?
The landmark Tickle v Giggle case has attracted global attention, including from JK Rowling – but abject silence from most of the Australian media. Sall Grover’s crowd-funding page might tell us the reason.
By Stephen Rice
Sydney Bureau Chief

... the moment the pond read "including from JK Rowling", the pond knew it was way past time to move on.

The pond did note an older jihad down the very bottom of the page ...

TAKEN FOR A RIDE
Concerns EV distance claims breached law
By Rhiannon Down

Once that bee gets in the bonnet, it never stops buzzing, though the pond did enjoy the hidden text describing the accompanying thumb snap, Smiling mom with son charging electric car. Family road trip vacation with electric vehicle. Mother and son charging electric car in nature background. i stock image

Deeply weird.

The lizard Oz editorialist also felt the need to join in the crusade ...

Electric vehicle ranges fall short, Infrastructure to support EVs is still in its early stages.
Editorial
less than 2 min read

Trust and dependability are high on the list of most car buyers, which is why electric vehicle companies are doing themselves no favours claiming the range of their cars, on a single battery charge, are far longer than they are in real driving conditions. Commonwealth-funded EV road tests conducted by the Australian Automobile Association, Geoff Chambers wrote in Thursday’s paper, found that five popular EV brands fell far short of their advertised ranges, which are calculated in laboratory tests. On long trips, drivers could find themselves stranded far short of the nearest charging point and their destinations.
The worst performer was the Chinese-made 2023 BYD ATTO3, which fell 23 per cent short in real-world tests, managing to cover only 369km instead of the lab range of 480km. Tesla, Kia and Smart EV models also came up short. The popular Tesla Model 3 recorded a real-world range of 441km on full charge, 14 per cent less than its lab range of 513km. The Tesla Model Y and Kia EV6 each fell 8 per cent short. The best performer was the 2024 Smart #3 model, at 5 per cent, or 23km, less than its lab-tested range of 455km. The cars were tested on a 93km circuit in and around Geelong. With the transport sector the third-largest source of domestic greenhouse gas emissions, EV buyers receive exemptions from fringe benefits tax and vehicle stamp duty, and registration discounts. The Electric Vehicle Council has warned that ending those perks would “slam the brakes on passenger EV uptake in Australia”.
It is ultimately owner satisfaction with performance that counts, however. Over-hyping EVs’ ranges, based on lab testing, does not engender confidence in buyers, especially those who have to cover long distances. On a recent journey down the Great Ocean Road in a $54,800 Xpeng G6, Jared Lynch concluded that EVs, while promising, are not ready for the mainstream yet. And infrastructure to support them is still in its infancy. “An internal combustion engine can be filled at a servo in less than five minutes and until EVs can match that, then they will remain only an enthusiast vehicle for inner-city dwellers,” Lynch wrote. 

The pond followed that link to Jared Lynch, and it turned out that this EV Lynch mob was a completely gormless twit of the first water, and his review of such limited interest that the pond consigned him to the bottom of the page.

As for a rag once again demonising "inner-city dwellers" from the wilds of Sydney's way out Surry Hills, the pond always breaks down under irony overload. 

Such is the peril of having a short range when it comes to such weirdness.

Over on the extreme far right, our Henry was, at least for a moment, top of the world ma ...

There was an irony in the juxtaposition of Jennings of the fifth form urging on the alliance with Japan and our Henry fondly reminiscing about the joys of nuking the crap out of them, and at this point it might be right to remind readers of the scientific laws established thus far, replicable and clearly proven by endless experimentation:

The First Law of Our Henry: “There is no argument that cannot be bolstered by citing a long-deceased notable who had no direct knowledge or experience of the subject under debate.”

The Second Law of Our Henry: "When citing historical sources, always ensure you include sufficient persons and verbiage to camouflage your exclusion of any inconvenient facts that do not support your arguments.” The discoverer of the law suggests this might be a more polite way of saying “Flood the zone with shit”, but correctly concedes a scholarly gent like Henry would never stoop to such crudity. They would prefer the genteel and concise summary offered by a learned correspondent, “Deluge the sphere with ordure”.

The Third Law of Our Henry: “On any issue of sensitivity involving persons whom he considers unrepresentative of ‘Western Civilisation’, expect our Henry to respond with a corresponding lack of sensitivity and a complete absence of empathy”, aka "What an arsehole"...

Have at them scientists, see if any apply and if any new ones can be discerned ...

The header: Hiroshima’s legacy lost in new age of Gaza activism, Far from marching across Sydney Harbour Bridge, Australians in 1945 knew that the price of peace had to be a victory that demolished Japanese militarism.

The caption for the uncredited snap, which purports to be real, but has a goodly chance of being an AI construct (why do all the AI generated images in the lizard Oz always look so dark and dingy?): A pro-Palestinian activist waves the Palestinian flag in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome during 80th anniversary commemorating the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

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

Our Henry this day manages an astonishing feat, linking the recent bridge march with memories of the bombing of Hiroshima...

No protesters streamed across Sydney’s Harbour Bridge in the months leading up to the atomic bombing, 80 years ago this week, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was undoubtedly a passionate desire to end the Pacific War, which had cost so many lives and inflicted so much suffering. But the peace had to be a peace worth having: a peace that was not just a cessation of hostilities but the road to a better future.
It’s not that the plight of Japanese civilians was anything but dire. During the First World War, Britain’s naval blockade of Germany had, as Winston Churchill approvingly put it, used “the weapon of famine” to “avowedly starve men, women and children, old and young, into submission”, causing 800,000 deaths in Germany and its Austrian ally.
Now the US Air Force’s aptly named “Operation Starvation” was inflicting that punishment on Japan, destroying nine-tenths of its shipping stock and eliminating the food imports on which Japan relied. The demolition of Japan’s domestic logistics network did the rest, forcing the regime to halve protein consumption and slash the rice ration – and a further 10 per cent cut was planned for August 11.

At this point, the pond should note that it's possible to find Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death in pdf form.

Vonnegut lived through (barely) the fire bombing of Dresden, and dresses it up with engaging ironies...

Another Kilgore Trout book there in the window was about a man who built a time machine so he could go back and see Jesus. It worked, and he saw Jesus when Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.
Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a rabble-rouser.
Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser was executed on it.
So it goes.

So the read went, and a vastly more engaging exercise it is than reading our Henry, as the reptiles interrupted him with a snap that has particularly irritated the reptiles, and been recycled a number of times, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange marches across the Sydney Harbour Bridge during a pro-Palestinian rally.

There's something about Assange that gets the reptiles frothing and foaming, but what gets the pond going is the way that the reptiles seem short on memory. 

What about the 2000 walk across the bridge in support of recognition and reconciliation?

What about the February 2003 march to protest the Iraq war? (that's an archive link).

Why did certain people discount the size of the most recent walk? (Graudian).

As an aside, the pond should note it didn't vote for Chris Minns, and wouldn't willingly vote for him at any time in the future, but back to our Henry joyously bombing the crap out of the Japanese ...

Meanwhile, the American bombing campaign was escalating relentlessly. Virtually from the Pacific War’s first days, the US Office of Strategic Services had begun preparing detailed maps of the areas within cities most vulnerable to incendiary attack while commissioning research on the napalm-filled “glue” bombs that could reduce them to dust and ashes.
Drawing on that planning, the USAF’s XXI Bomber Command had, in March 1945, initiated low-altitude carpet-bombing, with “Operation Meetinghouse”, which on March 9 dropped 1667 tons of incendiary cluster bombs on Tokyo – causing over 100,000 deaths in what was almost certainly the deadliest single bombing raid in history.
Nor was any respite in sight. Having shattered Japan’s air defences, the monthly tonnage of bombs, which increased from 13,800 tons in March to 42,700 tons in July, was set to reach 115,000 tons by the end of the year. Thanks to the steeply growing tonnage, the USAF had secured, in barely five months, two-thirds of the death toll caused by the Allied bombing of Germany over the entire course of World War II.
The Japanese were hardly in a position to complain. Starting with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Japan’s incendiary bombing of civilian targets involved attacks of unprecedented ferocity. And that was only a trivial share of the savagery it inflicted through means that ranged from mass executions to mass starvation – the 1944-45 famine in Java alone resulting in an estimated 1.8 million deaths. Gripped in a death cult even more intense than the Nazis, the Japanese regime placed no value whatsoever on human life.
The Allies had learnt that the hard way. “Everyone talks about fighting to the last man,” General William Slim observed, “but only the Japanese actually do it.” American statisticians showed that 95 per cent of the Japanese soldiers involved in Pacific Island battles chose death rather than surrender, leading to loss rates unparalleled even on Europe’s horrific eastern front.
Moreover, by the time of the battle of Okinawa, women and children were being pushed ahead of Japanese troops as human shields against close fire. That a quarter of Okinawa’s population died was irrelevant – all that mattered to the regime was the added efficacy of the imperial army’s defence.

Now if you want a serious consideration of the ethical, legal and military aspects of the nukings, there's a wiki, there's a bitesize BBC summary, and there's more at the quaintly named Atomic Heritage Foundation, and so on, and so it goes ...

The pond is content to be startled by the enthusiasm our Henry displays nuking Japan, perhaps as a prelude to the nuking of Gaza, Aerial view of the city of Hiroshima, shortly after the Americans dropped the first atom bomb.

Excellent job. By way of contrast, much has been done to Gaza, but much more could be done ...

Look at all those buildings still standing ... why, they're badly in need of a nuking.

In his rush to nuke everything in sight, the pompous war monger quite forgets the pleasures involved in destroying Carthage ...

The implications for an invasion of Japan’s mainland were terrifying. If the Allied casualty rate on Okinawa was replicated in Japan, where four million battle-hardened troops, backed by a civilian reserve of 15 million, lay in wait, the invasion would have led to the death of 485,000 Americans and nearly 100,000 British and dominion troops.
But given the terrain, the shortened lines of attack and the existential nature of the struggle, death rates were certain to be much higher than those suffered in Okinawa’s more favourable conditions.
It is therefore unsurprising that William Shockley, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who prepared the final estimates for US secretary of war Henry Stimson, concluded the invasion would cost the lives of up to 800,000 Allied troops. To that had to be added the murder by the Japanese of thousands of Allied POWs who, as had been graphically shown by the massacres on New Ireland and New Britain, were considered hostages to be slaughtered as soon as the invasion began.
Even ignoring the five million or more likely Japanese deaths, the atomic bombs’ toll of around 200,000 deaths seemed paltry by comparison, no matter how regrettable those deaths were.
That the atomic bombings avoided far greater losses, and, on August 15, finally brought the war to an end, is now beyond dispute. It is true that beginning in the 1960s, American “revisionist” historians, intent on denigrating their nation’s past, claimed otherwise; but they made tendentious use of Allied archives and precious little use of Japan’s. After the meticulous work of Kurihara Ken, Sadao Asada and a new generation of Japanese scholars, the revisionists’ claims have been decisively discredited.
There is, nonetheless, a sense in which there was an alternative to nuclear attack. Japan’s 1889 constitution gave the country’s three military leaders a de facto veto power in the cabinet; but despite the fantasies of army minister Korechika Anami (who committed ritual suicide on the night of Japan’s surrender) that “Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower”, even the so-called “war party” would have accepted a cessation of hostilities on terms that effectively allowed a kernel of Japanese militarism to survive.

"Now beyond dispute"?

Perhaps in our Henry's mind, but if the pond happened to be a Palestinian standing nearby, the pond suggests at a minimum an averted gaze and a nervous shuffling of feet. Who knows, you might be nuked in a nanosecond.

Cue a snap designed to inflame the sensibilities of the pond's extended family, many of whom refused to buy Japanese cars for decades, Emperor Hirohito in 1940.

What on earth would the extended family make of the news of the recent ship construction program? Dance with joy like Jennings of the fifth form?

Never mind, the pond has successfully filibustered to the end ...

Those terms, the Allies fully realised, were nothing but the antechamber to another war. US president Harry Truman was willing to make concessions, notably retaining the role of the emperor, albeit purely as a figurehead. But the power “of those who have deceived the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest”, the capacity to wage aggressive war, and the ideology that underpinned it, had to be obliterated “for all time”.
Australians believed that too. Most of the contemporary tyrants had, before the war, “sent apostles to Australia”, wrote Brian Penton, the brilliant newspaper editor and leading commentator; but “between them, their converts could not have raised one respectable heil”. Australians wanted to celebrate life, not protect murderers imbued with a cult of death. This much, in particular, they understood: that “if good men are to live in peace, bad men must live in fear”.
That is why Australians fought and died. That is why they overwhelmingly approved the dropping of the atomic bombs. And that is why they didn’t march across Sydney Harbour Bridge, demanding an immediate ceasefire, that would inevitably have left Japanese militarism intact, to alleviate the desperate plight of Japan’s starving children.
Eighty years on, that remains the lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a lesson we once knew. That it has been forgotten is more than a pity. It is a tragedy.

Yes, starve 'em all, nuke 'em all, let the blood lust flow freely. Destroy, kill, maim, starve, brutalise, it's the civilised way forward ...

Cruelty is everything ... and Curtis LeMay still lives, not just in Dr Strangelove, but in our Henry's heart ...

Near the end of our Henry's war mongering, the reptiles provided a link, which naturally kept everyone inside the hive mind. 

The pond appends a sample, if only because it honours the craven Craven, strutting forth like a Francis De Groot armed with a cavalry sword ...

So quickly and easily are bridge protests forgotten.

Here, have an infallible Pope to help with the celebrations ...

And so to a bonus, and the pond spurned all other offerings to go with Cam ...

The header: Trump-Putin summit more about delaying sanctions than pursuing peace, Vladimir Putin’s history of stringing Donald Trump along on Ukraine, and his unwavering and unacceptable demands so far, suggest he remains determined to keep fighting this war.

The caption: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump during a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in 2017. Picture: AFP.

It was only a three minute read, and the reason  pond decided to go there is because it has a bet going that King Donald will do another TACO routine... 

Vlad will likely come up with another soccer ball or a flattering portrait, and the appeaser and cheater in chief will fold like a caddie dropping a ball.

Besides, the pond wanted to quibble about that header, "more about delaying sanctions than pursuing peace".

It's just as much about Epstein distractions ...

All the same, Cam wasn't holding his breath ...

Donald Trump’s talk of a summit with Vladimir Putin has breathed unexpected life into a ceasefire process that was going nowhere, but any deal to end the Ukraine war remains a longshot.
Trump claims he intends to meet “very soon” with Putin and that there was “a very good chance” of reaching a ceasefire agreement after Russia suggested the meeting during a trip to Moscow by US special envoy Steve Witkoff. The first point to make is that there is no guarantee the summit will go ahead, given that Trump has talked about such a summit several times this year without one eventuating.
Secondly, the proposal, which Russia initiated, could easily be viewed as yet another tactic by Putin to further delay any peace talks and delay the imposition of new sanctions, given that Trump had set this Friday as his deadline for Putin to agree to a peace deal or face sanctions.
But this is the first time that Russia, rather than Trump, has initiated the idea of a leaders summit, so it is possible that Putin actually wants this face-to-face meeting with the US President.
If so, then this is good news only to the degree that face-to-face talks, especially with these two all-powerful leaders, have a better chance of a breakthrough than do talks between their subordinates.

Um, shouldn't that be that Vlad the sociopath has a better chance of getting King Donald to do his TACO routine?

Never mind, have a distracting AV interruption, strangely not from the White House roof, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday (August 6) the United States had held good talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and said there was a good chance that he would hold a meeting soon with the Russian leader.

As soon as King Donald uses the word "good", you know your TACO goose is cooked ...

Cam sounded glum and so he should, because this properly was a job for the bromancer ...

But for anything to come of them, Putin would need to show a willingness to offer genuine concessions to bring Russia and Ukraine closer to a deal, something he has refused to do all year. Instead, Moscow has demanded a string of impossible conditions, including withdrawal by Ukraine’s military from four eastern regions where Russian troops do not yet have full control, a refusal to allow European troops to keep the peace in Ukraine after a ceasefire, and a demand that Ukraine “demilitarise” under a neutral government.
A detailed Reuters report this week, citing Kremlin sources, claimed Putin planned to continue the war in the belief that Russia is winning, and that he believes the Russian economy can withstand extra sanctions Trump is planning.
The report claimed Putin wanted to improve relations with Washington but that his war aims took precedence.
If so, then any summit will be little more than a meaningless charade in the same way that Trump’s summits with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un during his first term turned out to be.
Trump has been played like a violin by Putin ever since he pushed hard for a ceasefire after taking office. Trump has berated Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to offer concessions while appeasing Putin. But flattery failed to bring Putin to the table, and in recent months Trump has increasingly expressed his disappointment in the Russian leader, who has expanded his military campaign along the frontline while accelerating his bombing of civilian targets in Ukraine. Trump then set an August 8 deadline for Putin to agree to a ceasefire or face a barrage of new US sanctions. He also authorised more US arms sales to NATO allies that are intended for Ukraine.

Then came another interruption, Sky News US analyst Michael Ware dismisses hopes that Russian President Vladimir Putin will accept a ceasefire with Ukraine proposed by US President Donald Trump. “While President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow, having met President Putin, Russia then sent a military strike into Ukraine that killed two civilians,” Mr Ware said. “This year alone, the Russians have killed, according to the UN, 6,700 innocent Ukrainian civilians.”

Sorry, Mr Ware, but Vlad the sociopath is just following our Henry's advice. 

The more civilians you kill, the more you brutalise a county, why all the better to ensure that a caring Xian civilisation will flourish ...

Please, finish up Cam ...

Trump this week stepped up plans to target Russian oil exports as a way to undermine its economy and its war machine. He pledged secondary sanctions against countries that imported Russian oil, saying he would place another 25 per cent tariff on India, taking it to 50 per cent, as punishment for its continued purchases of Russian oil. He has threatened similar action against China.
Experts are divided as to whether Putin would be deterred from his war plans even if the Russian economy were severely hit by a new sanctions regime. The first round of sanctions against Russia imposed by the Biden regime did nothing to deter Putin’s military campaign against Ukraine.
If Trump does actually meet with Putin, there is always the potential for an unexpected breakthrough. But Putin’s history of stringing Trump and the West along on Ukraine, and his unwavering and unacceptable demands so far, suggest nothing has changed and that he remains determined to keep fighting this war.

Here, have a cartoon to celebrate:

And that segues into a final outburst by the lizard Oz editorialist ...

Ukraine war’s Pacific implications, Buying oil from Russia has isolated India from the US in the Quad.
Editorial
2 min read

Do go on ...

For the sake of Ukrainians battling for their democratic nation’s existence after 3½ years of Russian invasion and partial occupation, and the sake of the wider world, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin must be leveraged into a lasting ceasefire. The number of casualties on both sides is appalling, but the impact on Ukrainians in Russian-occupied areas is devastating. At least 20,000 children have been taken to Russia, with many put into “re-education” camps and put up for adoption, severed from their Ukrainian families and roots, historian Niall Ferguson wrote recently.

Hang on, hang on, according to our Henry, nuking them is a jolly good way to teach them a lesson.

That is why Australians fought and died. That is why they overwhelmingly approved the dropping of the atomic bombs. That is why they celebrate the devastation of Ukraine (and Gaza too). And that is why they didn’t march across Sydney Harbour Bridge, demanding an immediate ceasefire, that would inevitably have left Ukrainian militarism intact, to alleviate the desperate plight of Ukraine’s displaced, re-educated and adopted children.
Eighty years on, that remains the lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a lesson we once knew. That it has been forgotten is more than a pity. It is a tragedy.

Sorry, lesson learned, best get the rest out of the way quickly ...

Donald Trump says there is a “good chance” he will hold face-to-face talks with Putin about a ceasefire in Ukraine – ­potentially as soon as next week – ­following an offer made by Russia during US special envoy Steve ­Witkoff’s trip to Moscow. That is good, Cameron Stewart writes, to the degree that face-to-face talks between the two leaders have a better chance of a breakthrough than talks between their subordinates. But the Russian dictator would be likely to use such a meeting to avoid signing a peace deal and continue attacking Ukraine, avoid heavy US sanctions and avoid sanctions on Russia’s energy customers, including India, whose revenue is helping keep the Russian onslaught afloat. Mr Trump had set this Friday as his deadline for Putin to agree to a peace deal or face sanctions. He has already announced another 25 per cent tariff on India, which has long had an economic relationship with Russia, bringing its total tariff to 50 per cent, a hike India has described as “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable”. Mr Trump has threatened similar action against China, another major Russian oil customer. And Europe is stepping up, with Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway buying $US1bn ($1.53bn) in US weapons for Ukraine.
From Australia’s perspective, as Ben Packham reports, a problematic factor is India’s membership of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between Australia, the US, India and Japan. A Quad summit later this year, in India, is now in doubt as Mr Trump’s tariffs widen the US rift with India. “(Indian Prime Minister Narendra) Modi is a proud leader,” US Studies Centre director Mike Green told The Australian. “He doesn’t want to schedule a meeting and have Trump make him look like a sucker.” Earlier this year, Mr Trump set back relations with India, experts believe, when he claimed he had brokered a ceasefire between India and Pakistan. He was seen by India as elevating Pakistan’s status as a regional player.
Ending the Ukraine war as soon as possible is important, a goal with which India, as a democracy, should be on board. But maintaining the Quad amid Chinese aggression also matters. A weakening of the group would be bad for Australia and the region. In July, Quad foreign ministers met in Washington and focused on the crisis in Myanmar, North Korea’s “destabilising launches using ballistic missile technology”, and “dangerous and provocative actions” in the East China and South China seas. As “four leading maritime nations in the Indo-Pacific” defending “the rule of law sovereignty and territorial integrity”, the Quad matters.

Good luck with mad King Donald, reptiles, but with all this talk of nuking this and slaughtering that, the pond thought it would end on an up note.

For reasons too mysterious to explain, the pond yesterday ended up in Turramurra at a bus station, watching a flock of cockies have a jolly good time. 

They flapped about, they crapped from the heights of the bus shelter, they walked insolently amongst human kind with not a care or fear in the world, and they put up their combs occasionally for a flash of colour. 

Would that the world could live in the style of Turramurra cockies, doing a dance celebrated by Wilcox (what do you know, patrons of the railway station even have their own working public toilet. And there are no barriers at the entrance, of the kind offered Inner West mugs. Oh it's a different world in Turramurra) ...

Yes, yes, the pond hadn't forgotten its promise to provide a sample of the Lynch mob EV review, but it's only for those who can cavort past the cockies.

In it he reveals himself as a range anxiety driven newbie, and it reminded the pond of how the old 80% rule is now completely forgotten or ignored.

it was once considered polite to construct your stops and your charging on the understanding that for most vehicles getting to a 100% took far too long (and was in any case unwise in terms of battery life), and so polite EV owners went to 80 and moved on. 

Now EV drivers are either incredibly rude or incredibly stupid, Lynch driving mob style ... (excluding those like the pond who have a car that charges very quickly, and so if no one's around a quick upping to 95 can be done before the charge speed tails off).

The pond hopes this EV Lynch mob's not out and about on the Hume next week, especially at the Tarcutta terminus, or a heated argument might ensue...

"Once charging is complete?" He didn't go to a 100% did he? Why is the name "Lynch" considered a curse word in the pond household?