In which the reptiles have a big Monday, with Cameron, the Caterist, our Henry and Major Mitchell all on present and incorrect, and on parade...

 

Yet again the pond looked at the top of the lizard Oz digital edition in despair ...

Gone already, swept away, now but a distant dream ...the triumph of Alaska disappeared into the cornfield, and in its place compelling stuff, such as "Are you happier than the average Australian? Take our quick quiz."

Nah, though it's good to know you can rate such things quix stix ...

Over on the extreme far right, it was pretty much the same ...

The pond had hoped for an ongoing celebration of the Alaska triumph, so that the pond might note Anne Applebaum in form in The Atlantic with Trump Has No Cards, Why would Putin need to make a deal with him? (* archive link)

Inter alia ...

...There is not much else to say about yesterday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, other than to observe the intertwining elements of tragedy and farce. It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, an amateur out of his depth, misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful. It’s ominous that Trump now says he doesn’t want to push for a cease-fire but instead for peace negotiations, because the latter formula gives Putin time to keep killing Ukrainians. It’s strange that Russian reports of the meeting focused on business cooperation. “Russian-American business and investment partnership has huge potential,” Putin said today.
I appreciate that many Ukrainians, Europeans, and of course Americans are relieved that Trump didn’t announce something worse. He didn’t call for Ukrainian capitulation, or for Ukraine to cede territory. Unless there are secret protocols, perhaps some business deals, that we haven’t yet learned about, Anchorage will probably not be remembered as one of history’s crime scenes, a new Munich Conference, or a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But that’s a very low bar to reach.
The better way to understand Anchorage is not as the start of something new, but as the culmination of a longer process. As the U.S. dismantles its foreign-policy tools, as this administration fires the people who know how to use them, our ability to act with any agility will diminish. From the Treasury Department to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, from the State Department to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agency after agency is being undermined, deliberately or accidentally, by political appointees who are unqualified, craven, or hostile to their own mission.

Holly Baxter was also in good scathing form in The Independent in Now we know just how useless Trump’s Alaska summit really was ... to everyone but Vladimir Putin, A nebulous amount of ‘progress’ has been made, and the two might meet again. But it’s pretty clear here that Trump got played in Alaska, writes Holly Baxter — and Putin got exactly what he came for

The pond eventually managed to dig up one commentary by Cameron Stewart ...and for once the reptiles realised that fawning over Faux Noise's sun king was a tad inappropriate ...

The header: Vladimir Putin the only winner out of half-baked Alaska summit, The summit failed to progress peace process in any meaningful way. It was the perfect outcome for the Kremlin.

The caption: US President Donald Trump greets Russian President Vladimir Putin on the tarmac at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on Saturday (AEST). Picture: AFP

Cameron wasn't happy ...

The war in Ukraine will not be ending any time soon.
That was the deafening message from the Alaska summit between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Despite Trump’s attempts to say the meeting was a success because they made “some headway” and “got along great”, the summit was a profound failure for Trump and a clear win for Putin.
Why? Because Putin gave up absolutely nothing to Trump. He refused Trump’s call for a ceasefire, which was Trump’s central aim of the summit. What’s more, Putin provocatively restated the need for Russia to address the “root causes” of the conflict, which means a demilitarised Ukraine free of Western military support or security guarantees.
However Trump has since told people that Putin accepted some form of Western military presence in Ukraine would be ultimately necessary in any deal.
Importantly, Trump is now reportedly more open since the meeting about the US giving some form of security guarantee to Ukraine.

The reptiles flung in a clip of Sky Noise down under, Sky News host James Morrow examines the “little military flex” US President Donald Trump exercised when he met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to discuss Ukraine in Alaska. “Yes, a nicely timed B2 fly over there – Putin, I’m sure, would have been quite jealous of the hardware,” he said. “Russia, of course, has nothing like that sort of kit.” Mr Morrow said Mr Putin’s encounter with the American media during his visit left him looking like “sleepy Joe”.

Sleepy Joe? Is that what they're calling full comatose?

Cameron carried on ...

Putin also invited Trump to another meeting in Moscow, an invitation that excludes the other key player in any peace deal, Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
In return, Putin bathed in the spectacle of being welcomed back on the international stage after being shunned for so long. The optics of Putin being applauded by Trump in a red-carpet welcome and laughing as they shared a ride in the presidential limousine offered a jarring contrast to the Oval Office fight between Trump and Zelensky in February.
The summit allowed Putin to win yet another reprieve from Trump’s threatened sanctions. It is the latest chapter in Putin’s strategy of stringing Trump along and delaying any serious tilt at peace while continuing to fight a war which he believes he is slowly winning.
For Putin, the longer he can prevent Trump from turning against him, the more freedom he has to keep fighting for advantage in Ukraine, giving him more negotiating power in any eventual ceasefire.
The clash of objectives between Putin and Trump were clear from the start. Trump wanted the summit to focus purely on Ukraine. Putin arrived with a group of Russian businessmen and spoke of a broader thaw in US-Russia relations.

Then came another Sky Noise down under clip, Sky News Senior Reporter Caroline Marcus claims Russian President Vladimir Putin “doesn’t seem to be backing down” from his demands amid America’s efforts to end the prolonged war in Ukraine. Ms Marcus said there can’t be a peace deal until an agreement is reached between Mr Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “For him not to have been involved in those initial talks, I think, were a problem,” she said. “I’m definitely not a Trump naysayer. I do think he could be the great peacemaker of our time, but unfortunately, we haven’t seen that happen – not in Russia … and not in the Middle East either.”

Neighsayer? If only ....

Cameron still carried on...

Trump is now in an invidious position. Does he keep giving Putin more time, knowing that the Russian is refusing to offer even a ceasefire, much less make the concessions which might form the basis of a workable peace?
Or does Trump turn on Putin and impose more US sanctions, drawing a line under his failed attempts to broker peace?
Ominously, after the summit Trump said that it was now ‘up to President Zelensky to get it done’, suggesting that Zelensky and Putin needed to sort out a ceasefire deal. But Zelensky and Putin remain as far apart as ever. They clearly hate each other and it seems inconceivable that they could broker any ceasefire without also having Trump in the room.
It’s possible – although hardly probable – that may happen. Trump now plans to meet Zelensky at the White House on Monday (local time) and says if it goes well, he’ll schedule a meeting with Putin.
The failure of the summit was clear in Trump’s morose face and his body language after their meeting – a stark contrast to his upbeat greeting of Putin on the tarmac.

The reptiles dragged in yet another clip... Treasurer Jim Chalmers claims Australia supports America’s efforts to get Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. “Putin needs to show that he’s actually serious here,” he told Sky News Political Editor Andrew Clennell. “We need a proper, lasting peace on Ukrainian terms; the war has dragged on for too long, the Russian aggression has dragged on for too long.”

Then it was a short gallop to the conclusion ...

The president who loves long rambling press conferences spoke for just three minutes and did not take questions. Trump had said previously he would be “disappointed” if he didn’t secure a ceasefire. While the full details of what unfolded in the meeting are yet to emerge, it is clear that “a deal” to end the fighting remains a distant hope.
The only good news from the summit was a sense of relief among Ukraine’s western allies that Trump did not appear to agree to anything which might have placed Ukraine and Zelensky in an untenable position.
The summit failed to progress the peace process in any meaningful way and it allowed Putin to rekindle his uncomfortably close personal relationship with Trump. It was the perfect outcome for the Russian dictator.

But what of the celebration of the triumph of tank man?

Duty done, the pond could turn to the Caterist, in an admittedly bog standard outing ...

The header: Bowen trapped in denial as AEMO slashes forecast for green hydrogen production targets, The most important rule in the start-up game is to fail fast and move on. Yet governments are institutionally resistant to acknowledging their mistakes.

The caption: Chris Bowen speaks at a press conference at the backyard of a Brisbane house equiped with solar panels and a battery, to discuss the federal government’s solar battery rebate scheme. Picture: Dan Peled

The great thing about the Caterist is that there's no need to argue, it's enough to watch the flood waters in quarries whisperer go through his routines ...

Last Friday, federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen exposed yet more skulduggery by climate deniers. Writing in The Australian, Bowen revealed that global warming sceptics had become “strategic sceptics” and were trying to sabotage the green economic boom.
Strategic scepticism is the act of “sowing doubt about the nature of the problem and the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of any available solutions”, he explained.
Strategic scepticism is spreading. BlackRock chief Larry Fink outed himself at a conference in Houston in March. “We can have blue and green hydrogen, but is anyone willing to pay the cost?” he said. “Let’s be clear – we’re going to be dependent on dispatchable power for some time.” Bloomberg New Energy Finance founder Michael Liebreich is also dubious. In June he described green hydrogen as “an article of faith” that was “just too expensive”.
Now the Australian Energy Market Operator is expressing reservations, at least towards the minister’s expectations that Australia will export up to 1.2 tonnes of green hydrogen a year by 2030. In its updated Inputs, Assumptions and Scenarios report, AEMO reduces its export assumptions for 2040 to zero. Its forecast for total green hydrogen production in 2024 has been reduced from 223 terawatt hours (about 6 million tonnes) to 52TWh (about 1.4 million tonnes) under its accelerated transition scenario.

Cue some noise from Sky Noise down under, Energy Minister Chris Bowen spruiks the Labor government’s Cheaper Home Batteries subsidy. “28,000 households have installed a cheaper home battery under the Albanese government’s program,” Mr Bowen said. “The program has been implemented and is working so successfully across the country. “Australian households have embraced this program with such enthusiasm.”

The Caterist  kept up the gloating, and never no mind the state of the planet, the extreme floodings here, the heatwaves there ... off to the cornfield for those stories ...

While AEMO has absorbed the message from the capital markets, Bowen is trapped in denial. The most important rule in the start-up game is to fail fast and move on.
Yet governments are institutionally resistant to acknowledging their mistakes. The penalties for failure for politicians are greater than the rewards for success.
Since governments are never more than three years away from the next election, they favour short-term wins and symbolic projects. They are prone to making technology choices shaped by ideology, lobbying or vote-buying rather than technical merit. The groupthink endemic in the political system encourages premature selection of winners rather than allowing the market to test options.
These truths serve as an explanation for the green hydrogen fiasco but not as an excuse. Bowen has brought a special hubris to the task, convinced he was across his brief from the moment he entered office. To him, the only obstacles to progress were a lack of political will or subsidies, which to Labor amounts to much the same thing.
At the heart of the government’s limitations is the knowledge problem, the inability of central planners to aggregate and adapt to dispersed knowledge as efficiently as competitive markets. It leads to overconfidence in grand plans untested by real-world complexity. Yet rather than return to the drawing board, Bowen seems intent on isolating himself still further by declaring legitimate questions about the economic and technological feasibility of his schemes off-limits. That is the effect of equating strategic scepticism with climate change denial. The rhetorical goal is to cast critics as morally suspect, not just scientifically mistaken.
Worryingly, the International Panel on the Information Environment, which coined the term strategic scepticism, argues for legal sanctions to stamp out climate misinformation and disinformation in the media.
The failure of green hydrogen to live up expectations is not for lack of effort. With 39 grant schemes totalling $12.4bn and another $29.4bn in hydrogen-eligible support, Labor can hardly be accused of putting too little sugar on the table. Yet no amount of subsidies will ultimately solve the insurmountable technical and commercial challenges.
Bowen requires fresh guidance on addressing challenging sectors, including agriculture, industry and transport. Yet his instinct is to double down. As recently as last month, Bowen held a press conference in the NSW Hunter Valley to announce he was offering an additional $432m to subsidise Orica’s 50MW production plant, on top of the $70m the federal government has already promised and the $45m offered by the state government. It was a sign of desperation.
The Orica plant is one of only a handful of large-scale projects among the 88 proposals listed as still alive in the CSIRO’s HyResource database. Most are at the proof-of-concept stage, some are described as “demonstration” or “experimental” projects. Some retain a semblance of life by being nailed to the perch.

Cue a final snap of the villains in the melodrama, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (right) and Federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen attend a press conference.

Then it was time for a final flurry of Caterist floozies...

Take Ark Energy’s SunHQ Hydrogen Hub in Townsville. Ark, a subsidiary of Korea Zinc, has recently completed a small hydrogen plant in Townsville with the assistance of $18.6m in federal funding and $8m from the Queensland government. It will produce about 140 tonnes a year that was intended to fuel a small fleet of trucks hauling zinc from the Sun Metals smelter to the Port of Townsville. That’s a 25km journey. The plan collapsed when the truck supplier, Hyzon Motors, went into liquidation this year.
Ark is now desperately seeking a buyer or, in the CSIRO’s delicate phrasing, “reviewing the project’s offtake solution”.
As of Friday, 67 projects were listed as abandoned. They include the CQ-H2 project, which underpinned the government’s ambition to turn Gladstone into a significant export hub. In October 2023, Bowen stated that work would begin in 2024 and the hub would be operational by 2027. “Nearly 9,000 jobs. Almost 300,000 tonnes of green hydrogen a year. That’s what we’ll be producing in Gladstone,” he said.
The political class wasn’t always this gullible. A century ago, Australia was being pressured to subsidise the Imperial Airship Company’s proposal for a hydrogen airship service linking distant corners of the empire.
Dennis Burney, a leading proponent, gave assurances for the service’s safety. “I do not think there has ever been a case of a modern German Zeppelin either breaking in two or catching fire in the air,” he told a public gathering.
Prime minister Stanley Bruce returned from the 1923 Imperial Conference unconvinced. Air Ministry experts had told him the future lay with heavier-than-air craft. Strategic scepticism abounded. Member for Moreton Arnold Wienholt told parliament: “Australia already has too many expensive white elephants, such as Australia House, Canberra, and the Northern Territory. We ought not to add to them.” Happy days.

A classic really, a silly Pom quoting a PM who went by the nickname of "Spats" (for much the same reason as George Raft doing Spats Colombo), and who thought that the NT was beastly thing, all wet and dry and deserted and not even up to a Somerset Maugham story. 

Does the lizard Oz sell in the NT? 

What do Territorians think about a bounder and a cad crying happy days as he bleats about them being a beastly white elephant?

Never mind, it's a real feast this day, so the pond must hurry on.

Such is the wealth of material that the pond did think of putting our Henry in the archive.

What was the pond thinking? 

This is the hole in the bucket man fixing it in splendid style, showing a return to form ...

The header: Economic dreamers in the clouds on reform, The bad news is we have no idea where we’re going, but the good news is that the summit will help us get there more quickly.

The caption for the man looking silly in a way the reptiles loved: Treasurer Jim Chalmers ahead of the Albanese government’s Economic Reform Roundtable this week.. Picture: Annette Dew

It was an epic bout of our Henry references, a goodly five minutes the reptiles clocked it at, though it took the fix it man a while to get warmed up ...

If Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit was what a policy discussion looks like when its participants have been heavily dosed on LSD, the drug of choice at this week’s economic reform roundtable seems to be Valium.
To say that is not to be dismissive. After all, dullness may have its faults but it is blissful at a time when differences are being played out in far more divisive and destructive ways. If economists are to be Australia’s sorcerers disguised as studious bean-counters, witchdoctors quietly wielding spreadsheets and equations, one can say only that mankind has produced much nastier alternatives.
The risk, however, is that the semblance of rigour, the mumbo-jumbo of the economist’s craft, can readily give credibility to arguments that, stripped of the arcane, are nugatory. Even worse, they can paper over omissions, inconsistencies and evasions that, more simply stated, would be glaring.
Nowhere are those risks greater than in the papers prepared for the event by the “official family”; that is, Treasury, the Productivity Commission and the Reserve Bank.
It is, for example, striking that while all of the papers complain about excessive regulation, they contain twice as many recommendations for new or expanded regulations as proposals to pare regulations back.

Fond memories as former Chairman Rudd made an appearance, Kevin Rudd addresses delegates and participants gathered at the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra during closing ceremony of “Future Directions for the Australian Economy”, the 2020 Summit.

Our Henry showed the Caterist how to do it when it comes to climate...

Nor do the papers pay much attention to the compliance burdens their recommendations entail. To take but one example, the PC’s paper on the energy transition recommends extending to an additional 370 facilities a highly complex scheme – the so-called Safeguard Mechanism – that currently applies to a small number of major emitters.
But instead of carefully examining the resulting compliance burden, and the extension’s impact on those facilities’ viability, the paper blithely assumes the benefits of its recommendation would exceed the costs.
Even more serious, however, is the official family’s reluctance to put dead cats on the table. Thus, the energy transition paper notes that regardless of our future emissions policies, “we are likely to face significant climate-related risks” as global average temperatures seem set to rise by 3C. That may not be intended to mean that our emissions policies are pointless but it clearly implies there is little chance that they will achieve their stated goal of averting climate change.
But shouldn’t that affect the costs we are willing to bear to reduce emissions? Or has the PC convinced itself of the somewhat eccentric proposition that the probability of a policy succeeding is irrelevant to the sacrifices it is rational to make in its pursuit?
No less startling is the complete absence in those papers of any mention of the effects the dramatic increases in power prices provoked by the energy transition have had on productivity growth. Yet there is a mountain of evidence that the energy price shocks of the 1970s helped cause the subsequent collapse in productivity by accelerating the scrapping of energy-intensive plant, reducing capacity utilisation and increasing the user cost of capital.
It would, however, be a mistake to think the polite silence applies only to the energy transition. The papers rightly highlight the shortage of investment. But there is not a word about the appallingly inefficient use of capital that has been made by Australian governments in recent years.

The reptiles took a detour into Sky Noise down under, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has spoken to Sky News Australia ahead of the government’s Economic Reform Roundtable, which is set to take place next week. “I think it’s no secret that the Prime Minister’s government, really one of the defining features of his government, is the considered and consultative way that he goes about leading that government,” he told Sky News Political Editor Andrew Clennell. “And so, it was his view and my view, more or less simultaneously, that this is a good way to go about it. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to build on our agenda, and that’s what this Economic Reform Roundtable’s all about.”

Then our Henry really cranked into gear.

You want Edmund Burke, you want Gladstone? You got 'em ... and never mind the onion muncher sending Malware off on a mission to destroy the NBN (and achieving it)...

For example, the NBN, which Labor loudly claimed would earn a fully commercial rate of return, will by 2026 have effectively written off as much investment as it was originally estimated to require. It is, of course, in good company, drowning, as we are, in infrastructure projects that would fail any properly implemented cost-benefit test and in off-budget commonwealth ventures that could be called fit for purpose only were that purpose the frittering away of taxpayers’ funds.
The Hilmer report, which recognised that the quality of investment was every bit as important as its level, tried to break our governments’ addiction to squandering capital. Well, it’s back – and no one in the official family seems willing to call it out.
Multiplying those examples would be child’s play. Yet they are, in reality, simply symptoms of the underlying problem. The papers emphasise the importance of reinvigorating productivity growth.
Their remedies, however, just tinker at the edges, proposing some changes that are sensible, others that are much less so. That is not so much a failure of boldness; it is a failure of vision – the lack of a coherent view of what we ought to be trying to achieve.
That vision was at the heart of what was long meant by reform. When Edmund Burke, in advocating his “economical reform” bill of 1780, said “to reform is not to innovate”, he was explicitly distinguishing his proposals from paltry attempts at marginal repairs. What he sought, he said, was “radical”, in the sense that it would address – incrementally but surely and steadily – the root cause of the “great distemper”, which was the use of public spending to induce dependence on the state rather than independence from it, sapping the very energies England needed to encourage.
It was also with that meaning of the term in mind that William Gladstone framed his great budgets and the famous Midlothian speeches. Fiscal prudence was not to be pursued for its own sake; it was to be sought because waste and robbing Peter to bribe Paul both displaced private initiative and “impeached all public character”, undermining the legitimacy of the entire political class.

How could the reptiles make it any better? You guessed it, by shoving in huge snaps of Ming the Merciless and the lying rodent, aka Sir Robert Menzies, John Howard.

Is there a contractual requirement that the reptiles always run a snap of Ming? Often adjacent to the lying rodent? 

Even if there is, is it wise for the reptiles to show Ming puffing on a cigar like some robber baron from the 1890s?

Never mind, our Henry was off and running ...

There is a direct line that runs from there to Robert Menzies and John Howard, with their emphasis on lifters, not leaners, and, for all of their differences, to Margaret Thatcher and the other reformers of the 1980s.
It was an overarching purpose and coherence of vision that gave those leaders’ reforms a social as well as economic character and a moral as well as pragmatic dimension. And it is that unity of purpose and coherence these papers, and the government they reflect, utterly lack.
The bad news, in short, is that we have no idea where we’re going. The good news is that thanks to these deliberations, we will get there more quickly.
For my part, I will spend the days when our witchdoctors are at work re-reading Thomas Love Peacock’s glorious satire Crotchet Castle (1831), which centres on discussions around the table of economic reform.
How can one not admire its delightfully named Scotsman, Mr MacQuedy – whose adoration of economists, “the modern Athenians”, knows no bounds – and his dining companion, the Reverend Doctor Folliott, who ridicules economics as “premises assumed without evidence, or in spite of it; and conclusions drawn from them so logically, that they must necessarily be erroneous”?
And who could resist, when the roundtable’s communique eventually appears, clutching a stiff drink and intoning – as Folliott and MacQuedy do, having debated the burning fiscal issues of the day (which they don’t understand) over several bottles of claret (which they understand all too well) – their splendid economic reformers’ hymn?
So, dear reader, please raise your glass and declaim with me:

After careful meditation,
And profound deliberation,
On the various pretty projects which have just been shown,
Not a scheme in agitation,
For the world’s amelioration,
Has a grain of common sense in it ... except my own.

A classic, and you too can join our Henry in reading Crotchet Castle, courtesy Project Gutenberg, and spend your life imagining yourself in the nineteenth century, and perhaps singing some Gilbert and Sullivan as a solution to current economic woes,  as a sign you're a top notch economic analyst... 

You know, there's nothing like the living in the nineteenth century in your head - even better than ancient Athens or Rome - as a way of dealing with current realities...

And so to the Major, in from hacking around on the links.

The pond is now way over length and did think of putting him in the archives...

But the Major's jihad this day overlooked a big story, as did the reptiles more generally.

For that you had to head off to other sources, such as Haaretz ...

'We Must Keep Disrupting, Again and Again' | Hundreds of Thousands of Israelis Flood Tel Aviv Demanding a Hostage Deal to End Gaza War, A mass rally in Tel Aviv's Hostages' Square capped a day of protests and strikes led by freed hostages and families of those still in captivity. Ruby Chen, whose son Itay's body is held by Hamas, addressed Netanyahu: 'After the October 7 failure, you have the nerve to say the price is too high to bring them back. Where is your shame?' (*archive link)

One quote helps convey the mood ...

Ruby Chen, father of Itay Chen, an Israeli-American IDF soldier killed on October 7, spoke as well. "Bringing back the hostages and our children isn't a gift to the enemy – it is a moral, ethical, Jewish act," he said.
He addressed Netanyahu: "You and your government brought Qatari cash into Gaza for years. You turned Hamas into a monstrous war machine. On your watch, Hamas attacked the Gaza border and killed over 1,200 Israelis!"
"And on your watch, 250 hostages were taken, and 50 are still there, including my son," Chen said. "And after that failure, you have the nerve to say that the price is too high to bring them back? Where is your shame?!"

Here no shame, no shame here.

The Major, intent on his usual jihad, would have none of that sort of talk. As Lord Haw-Haw was to Adolf, so the Major is to Benji and his far right barking mad fundamentalist minions...

The header: 'Words as gospel': Warped moral code of Hamas's media enablers, Left-wing journalists continue to deny the barbaric pogram committed against Israeli civilians, and amplify any malicious allegation against the Jewish state.

The caption: Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong ‘are recognising Palestine when it has no prospect for statehood’ while other ‘facts about the Middle East’ trouble neither of them.

Some might think that what follows is actually a press release by the current government of Israel, regurgitated by the reptiles, with the Major acting as cover, but the pond believes it's the Major doing the regurgitation ...

Mass moral posturing, especially on social media, has destroyed the search for truth in journalism and politics.
But Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is allowing the decline of truth to threaten the world’s acceptance of the Jewish State and turbocharge anti-Semitism.
Left-wing journalists have since October 7, 2023 denied the barbaric pogrom committed against Israeli civilians and amplified any malicious allegation against the Jewish state by Hamas or its health and media workers.
Many continue to claim two-year-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, pictured on the front of newspapers around the world and The Age here, is a victim of Israel’s starvation policies when they know he has a genetic condition and his brother and mother are well fed.

Cue a snap designed to help the Major maintain his jihad, The photo of Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq. Picture: Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu/Getty Images

Never mind the actual snaps of actual starvation doing the rounds, what of the crowd this weekend?

It was a bigly crowd, a crowd that refused to swallow the lies, lies being pretty much all that Palestinians have to eat these days ...

Sorry, when on a jihad, best ignore all that. Why that's just a bunch of left-wing journalists and their fellow travellers taking to the streets (and never mind the 147 or so countries that have joined them in their folly)

Trust the Major as he maintains his jihad ...

The picture remains pinned at the top of pro-Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah’s feed on social media platform X, and has been since July 25. She stood with former NSW premier Bob Carr at the front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge protest on August 3.
Footage of Gazans attending food drops for months has shown people who look anything but starving. Journalists not there insist Gazans are starving.
Our media holds Israel responsible for Hamas’s pilfering of aid and its murders of Gazans trying to get that aid. Israel should allow Western journalists into Gaza to see for themselves.
US President Donald Trump last Thursday agreed foreign journalists should be allowed in to tell the truth.
Two glaring examples of anti-Israel bias from the ABC: 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson on Thursday cut off US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee every time he said people should not believe what Hamas’s health ministry says, and Radio National breakfast show host Sally Sara, interviewing Israel Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel on Friday, insisted Haskel was wrong and Gazans are starving.
Never mind the Gaza health ministry has claimed mass famine for more than a year and it has proven untrue.

It takes astonishing blinkers to ignore actual snaps of actual events, but the Major wears them in style, Mark Dreyfus meets with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel. Picture: X

But what of the crowds?

My, they were bigly ...

But remember, the Major is on a jihad, and has no time for alternative realities ...

For sceptics who don’t believe Hamas steals aid, The Free Press on August 12 published an excellent piece on the issue under the headline “Why Is Reuters Carrying Water for Hamas?”, which details misleading reporting of USAID investigations of the issue.
The false starvation photo and others like it outed by Netanyahu in a fiery press conference last week are like the lie spun by the BBC and the ABC that there is no evidence to support Israel’s claim Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, killed last week in Gaza City, was a Hamas operative.
Eighteen months ago, UK investigative journalist David Collier published the Hamas associations of Gazan journalists the International Committee to Protect Journalists had claimed were killed by Israel for simply doing their jobs. In fact many were using journalism to hide their military roles.
Collier reminded the BBC of this last week after it claimed Israel was concocting evidence against Sharif.
He published details of the Al Jazeera bureau chief’s Hamas affiliation, pro-Hamas social media activity and a photo of Sharif hugging now dead Hamas military chief Yahya Sinwar.

Cue another snap to help with the jihad, A billboard depicting Hamas’s slain leader, Yahya Sinwar, with the Arabic slogan ‘if Sinwar departs from the battlefields, Palestine will birth a thousand Sinwars’. Picture: Mohammed Huwais / AFP

But what of that crowd and their message?

Forsooth, forget it, it's still Major jihad time ...

Collier also published a Telegram post by Sharif from January 27, 2023, celebrating the murder of seven Jews with a cartoon picture of a bullet capped by a Dome of the Rock.
Western reporters should by now know almost all journalists, doctors, nurses and teachers in Gaza are Hamas members, just as some UN employees are Hamas militants. Yet our reporters treat the words of such people as gospel.
Now a communique signed by the Arab League, European countries and Canada is trying to use recognition of Palestine as a lever to force Netanyahu’s hand on plans to occupy Gaza City in the next two weeks.
In Australia, journalists fixated on what this country can do to stop the war spent weeks demanding Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declare when he would join the other signatories, led by France’s Emmanuel Macron – as if Australia has any influence on Israel’s decision-making.
Albanese folded on Monday after saying only a fortnight earlier on ABC Insiders that he would not recognise an independent Palestinian state. This earned him praise from Hamas.
Yet Israel alone, with US support, will set the conditions for a Palestinian state, as Huckabee tried to tell Ferguson. It won’t be soon because Hamas has undermined Israeli support for a two-state solution.
Remember, Israelis effectively voted in the early 1990s to surrender their own lands in places such as the Golan Heights to achieve peace. PLO leader Yasser Arafat could not deliver the deal for his people.
On February 5 last year this column said: “The truth is Israelis who once supported the two-state solution now have a clear understanding of what a two-state solution would look like: Gaza.”
That’s because former prime minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally left Gaza in 2005, and in a subsequent election the Islamist Hamas death cult defeated the Palestinian Authority and went on to murder the PA candidates.

The final snap showed a fiend in action, Former NSW premier Bob Carr at the 'March for Humanity' held across the Sydney's Harbour Bridge. Picture: Tom Parrish

That send the crusading Major off on a final rant ...

Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong are recognising Palestine when it has no prospect for statehood. Albanese repeats assurances from PA leader Mahmoud Abbas that Hamas will have no role in a future Palestinian state, which he says will recognise Israel’s right to exist.
This from an 89-year-old failed leader and Holocaust denier who has not taken the PA to an election for 20 years and is far less popular than Hamas. His guarantee is worthless.
Seth Mandel in Commentary magazine on August 11 quoted US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who correctly noted three days earlier: “Talks with Hamas fell apart on the day Macron made the unilateral decision that he’s going to recognise the Palestinian state … (making) it harder to get peace and harder to achieve a deal with Hamas.”
Mandel goes on to quote from a New York Times video: “Mr Macron told (German Chancellor Friedrich) Merz that he was under immense pressure at home”, and would have to recognise Palestine.
That’s the real reason for Australia’s action – domestic pressure.
Facts about the Middle East trouble neither Albanese and Wong, nor the journalists who interview them. Both politicians, and the ABC’s Sally Sara, have parroted false claims that Palestine has been denied a state for 77 years. Wrong.
Resolution 181 in November 1947 provided for separate Jewish and Palestinian states but the Arabs of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria rejected this and invaded the newly proclaimed Israel.
Arabs had earlier rejected a 1922 League of Rights proposal to establish separate Jewish and Palestinian states. Nazi collaborator Haj Amin el-Husseini rejected a proposed partition put forward by the 1937 British Peel Commission, which would have given Jews a small state by the sea and Arabs the rest of British Mandate Palestine.
The Palestinians rejected formal offers of their own state under the Oslo Accord between prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat in 1993-94.
They again rejected a peace deal put forward by US president Bill Clinton and Israeli PM Ehud Barak in 2000, and another by prime minister Ehud Olmert in 2008.
The truth is, just like Hamas and Iran, too many Palestinians want one Palestinian Muslim state, the destruction of Israel and the expulsion or murder of its Jews. The original 1989 Hamas constitution is explicit, as are Hamas’s financial backers in Iran.

Indeed, indeed, and yet the infallible Pope had a thought on the weekend ...

On the upside? Why the pond completely forgot about it, and failed to mention it, and so did the reptiles ...