In which only the onion muncher makes the cut, but there are plenty of reading assignments for correspondents ...

 

Times are changing and the pond must keep up with the times, and find new ways to relate to the barking mad fundamentalists who assemble on the extreme far right of the lizard Oz early in the morning ...

These days, thanks to the archive, the pond can merely assign reading to correspondents ...

The pond realises that the archive is fragile and drops out every so often, but while it's there, the pond can offer an expanded reptile universe to its correspondents, with plenty of reading assignments ...

Want a dose of Alex? Here you go ...

Indigenous ‘truth-telling’ education will be anything but an advantage
Embedding Indigenous ‘truth-telling’ into the school curriculum will create a two-tiered education system based on race.
By Alex McDermott

Funnily enough the archive version had a more revealing header:

Schooled in harsh narrative of strife and resentment

The pond's only thought? What's with the talk of a two-tiered education system based on race? What's with the "will create"?

Back in the pond's day, Aboriginal kids were herded into a portable building, across the oval and way out of sight of the other Tamworthians in the gulag. They had their own special gulag...

The Aboriginal kids possibly thought they were being schooled in the harsh narrative of strife, resentment, and two-tiered isolation, and so they were. So it was, so it is, and no doubt so it will be if the likes of Alex have their way ...

Never mind, want to take a look at Jack? Easy ...

Tax and policy logic gone in a puff of illicit smokes
Addicted to tobacco excise revenues, governments believed there was no limit to the price tobacco consumers would pay. They were wrong. The black market stepped in with a match.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Again the header in the archive gave a better clue ...

It’s bad policy, but there is no escape from dangerous tobacco laws

The IPA's devotion to big tobacco still lingers in the reptile heart.

Feel like a little bombing of a country? 

Have the reptiles lined up a treat for you ...

Qatar, arsonist and firefighter, will pay the price of its associations
Qatar has for 20 years enthusiastically fanned the flames of instability and Islamist revolt across the Middle East. The Doha strike suggests Israel no longer feels bound to indulge it.
By Jonathan Spyer

The archive header was more revealing of the inner war monger's inclinations:

Israel’s daring air strike on Hamas in Qatar was long overdue

Daring, in the sense only that it dared to set regional and world nerves a-jingling at yet another shameless outrage.

And where does the tintinnabulating war monger hail from?

Jonathan Spyer is a Jerusalem-based journalist and analyst on Middle East affairs.

Of course there were some opposing views ...

The immortal Rowe also helped out with an American spelling for blank cheque ...

What did that remind the pond of?

Fully depreciated of course ...

And what was happening over on what the reptiles like to think of as the legit "News", which is to say where you'll never read yarns such as 

The Globalists of MAGA
Trump and his followers are forging an international movement devoted to their authoritarian cause.

Or

Authoritarianism Feels Surprisingly Normal—Until It Doesn’t

Life in Venezuela was deceptively mundane. Then everything collapsed.

Or

The Intellectual Vacuity of the National Conservatives
The post-liberal American right set out to destroy the guardrails that restrained anti-Semitism, without giving any thought to what might happen next.

Instead there were only limited options, with the Price is Wrong leading the way ...

Again the pond makes no apologies for handing out reading assignments ...

Liberal turmoil
Price defiant as Ley axes senator from frontbench
The ousted NT senator is vowing to use her position on the backbench to campaign on dumping net zero, migration and the threat of China.
By Greg Brown

There was a reptile standing by to celebrate ...

Commentary by Geoff Chambers
Mud-slinging may stick, but for now Ley is in charge
The messy saga fuelled by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s clumsy mass migration comments has exposed cracks in the Liberal Party and the Opposition Leader’s long-term leadership aspirations.

There was a BREAKING story by AP, which no doubt will set reptile nerves in a tingle in due course ...

BREAKING 
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk shot at Utah college event
The right-wing activist and close Trump ally is in critical condition after being shot in the neck by a gunman who has been detained.
by AP

What to say, except that's America and of course Redditors were immediately in on the irony of talking about gun control...

"Some of you may die. But it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
He just never thought he'd be a sacrifice.

The pond tends to go biblical at such moments, and always favours the KJV, though it's errant in many ways ...

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
For he that soweth to his King Donald shall of the Epstein flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the gun control laws shall of the gun control laws reap life everlasting.
And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.

Strange how prescient the old prophets were ...

Meanwhile, down at the very bottom of the "news" side of the digital edition came an EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Liberal director ridiculed women, MP ‘with dementia’ in leaked texts
Liberal Party tensions have exploded after leaked messages revealed the Victorian state director disparaged women leaders, prompting calls for his resignation | READ THE TEXTS
By Anthony Galloway

Unfortunately the archive version doesn't convey the flavour, so here's a teaser ...

Lordy, lordy, ain't the Victorian Liberals a bunch of barking mad fundamentalist Xian wags, but when it comes to payback, things can get ugly ... 

Did you like that framing of the cut-out figure? Each time the pond thinks that Frank can't beat AI slop at the game, Frank comes up with a winner ...

Unfortunately the archive version lacked the flavour of the texts, so here they are ...

Oh it's a hard rain gunna fall ...

As a result of handing out all those reading assignments, the pond's own chores have been dramatically reduced.

The pond selected just one reptile ... making for an exceptionally dull and predictable choice ...

The header: We’ll always welcome migrants who want to join Team Australia, In my country, there has always been a ready welcome for newcomers who work hard, obey the rules and join Team Australia.

The caption for the nauseating flag waving and flag dressing, a bit like King Donald fornicating with a flag, or JD with a couch, Immigration can touch so many deep chords and can make such a difference to the way people live. Picture: William WEST / AFP

It was a five minute read, so the reptiles said, but the pond had an unnerving feeling that something was afoot, in the Sherlock sense of the word...

And sure enough, after a nano second of sleuthing this hovered into view ...

Yes, it was the onion muncher at Substack, listed as appearing some 22 hours ago, and picked up by the reptiles, though in in the reptile presentation, stripped of that graph ...

The racism, the white nationalism, the bigotry however managed to make the leap intact ...

Just because immigration is a sensitive subject doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be discussed. In settler societies, there’s often a particular reticence because almost everyone is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants, and raising immigration issues can seem personal in a way few other debates are.
But it’s more than possible to be pro-migrant without supporting an ever larger and ever more diverse immigration program. Indeed, given that migrants choose to come to their new home, there should be no expectation, in making migrants welcome, that they want their new countries to resemble their old ones.
It’s precisely because immigration can touch so many deep chords and can make such a difference to the way people live that it may need to be talked about, and subsequently better managed, especially when very high immigration is driving economic and social strain.
The chaos on the US southern border and the influx of perhaps 10 million people in four years was a key factor in the re-election of Donald Trump. Tens of thousands of boatpeople surging across the English Channel every year, amounting to a peaceful invasion, are behind the rise of the insurgent Reform UK party in Britain.
And in Australia on August 31, upwards of 50,000 people took to the streets, unsummoned by any significant authority figure, in a largely spontaneous cry of concern about the impact of sustained record migration.

Just because bigotry and white nationalism is a sensitive subject doesn't mean the bigots blathering on about the Anglosphere, as a dog whistle to devotees of great replacement theory and other conspiracies, shouldn't be discussed.

Contra to the original presentation - sorry the pond won't link to the onion muncher's Substack, he must drive his hits on his own - the reptiles decided to slip in a little of their own brand, in the form of an AV distraction, Former Liberal senator Hollie Hughes says Senator Jacinta Price has got to “own the consequences” of not believing in the leadership of the Liberal Party and her remarks on Indian migration. “What this is actually about is the fact that Jacinta refused point-blank to apologise for remarks,” Ms Hughes told Sky News host James Macpherson. “If she had apologised straight away, this would’ve been over. “The Indian community deserves more respect from the Liberal Party. “Her inability to walk back those comments and apologise for them … has done her the damage.”

Whatever...

Now to make the racism explicit ... you know, Judeo-Christian ethos, Anglosphere, yadda yadda ...

As has happened elsewhere, too, many in government and the media used the presence of a handful of extremists in the crowd to discredit all of them as divisive, bigoted and even racist, in a bid to shut down debate.
Countries such as the US, Canada and Australia would not exist in their modern form but for settlement and subsequent immigration. Even Britain has been largely formed by successive waves of immigration by force – the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans – and more recently by post-war migration from the former British Empire, then the EU and now the wider world. Until recently, the countries of the Anglosphere generally have regarded themselves as exemplars of social contentment; not entirely without social tensions but with an Anglo-Celtic core culture and a Judeo-Christian ethos that can and should transcend racial, ethnic and cultural differences.
The argument for high immigration is generally that more migrants make a bigger economy and that individual migrants add to a country’s skills.
In practice, in all the Anglosphere countries, recent migrants are filling the entry-level jobs that locals are reluctant to do. As well, in all of them, immigration is substituting for the children that the native-born seem reluctant to have. It’s sometimes said, especially by the advocates of multiculturalism, that a large and diverse immigration intake improves countries by adding to their linguistic and culinary competence. Then there are the Marxists whose deep agenda is not humanitarianism or anti-racism but to harness “diversity” to erode unity and to dilute an identity they reject.
Immigration at record levels (as is or was until recently happening in all the Anglosphere countries) puts downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs and significant strain on physical and social infrastructure.

Those who did their homework, and followed the link to Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic would have read his tale of natcon Washington conference woes ...

Inter alia ...

...If the old red lines no longer obtain, what new lines would the natcons respect, if any? Defining a workable alternative to liberalism is a difficult challenge, one the natcons did not even attempt to meet with anything deeper than sloganeering—specifically, “You can just do things,” a mantra I heard incessantly at the conference. The you in this formulation is the natcons themselves, once they control the state. They extend to their opponents no such liberty. National conservatism is not so much a new way of wrestling with the dilemmas posed by liberalism as permission to avoid wrestling with them at all. The philosophy, such as it is, can be summarized as: impunity for us, punishment for them.
But exactly who is the us, and who is the them? This is where things get tricky.
In his opening remarks, Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-born Jew, complained that the post-liberal right has shockingly been infiltrated by anti-Semites. “I’ve been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people that there’s been online the last year and a half,” he noted. “I didn’t think it would happen on the right. I was mistaken.”
In fact, the amazing thing is that a faction as theocratic and nativist as the national-conservative movement ever had Jews in it to begin with. Hazony is one of the movement’s founders, many of its fellow-traveling intellectuals are Jewish, and its conferences attract disproportionate numbers of Orthodox Jews.
Generally, the natcons expound the position that the United States is a Christian country but that Jews deserve protection as junior partners, and that observant Jews have more in common with the Christian right than either has with secular liberals. (The term Judeo-Christian gets thrown around a lot, which at least some of them seem to appreciate.) “Jews and Christians are partners in the effort to uphold the moral framework that sustains our society, including marriage,” Rabbi Ilan Feldman declared last week at a panel calling for the reversal of the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. “Sadly, too many Jews, like Christians, have turned away from their traditional values but still speak in the public arena in the name of Judaism.”
In his remarks, Hazony explained that he has spent years building goodwill by defending various right-wing nationalists from charges of anti-Semitism. “It makes you really popular,” he said. “Everybody is really grateful: I’m the guy who defended them against absolutely false, ridiculous accusations of anti-Semitism.” Yet now, “for reasons that I don’t necessarily understand,” he has discovered that those erstwhile allies “think Jews are a big problem.”
Hazony did not offer any theories as to why this sudden transformation has occurred. He appeared genuinely baffled that anti-Semitism would pop up in, of all places, a reactionary nationalist formation dedicated to purifying the homeland of foreign influences.
Even a glance at his own conference agenda should have given him an inkling. Senator Eric Schmitt gave a speech arguing that liberals had turned American identity into a “deracinated ideological creed.” The American people, he argued, “are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.” He counterposed the Americanness of Scots-Irish families and his own German ancestors from before the Civil War against “the elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere.” (Rootless cosmopolitans, you might call them.)
Various speakers echoed versions of this theme. Posobiec mocked the idea that immigrants could become assimilated. “Did these mass migrants suddenly erase centuries of culture?” he asked. “Did they erase their old loyalties?” Vought mocked former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan for having opposed Donald Trump’s first-term Muslim ban. At a panel debating Middle East policy, one questioner brought up Israel’s inadvertent 1967 attack on an American warship, an event of obsessive fascination for anti-Semites and few others; another casually invoked the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt.

Of course none of that has anything to do with the current barking mad fundamentalist Israeli government bombing the crap out of anyone in the neighbourhood ...but it has a weird affinity with the current onion muncher text du jour.

How the pond yearns for the good old days of rootless cosmopolitanism, anything but this kind of bizarre coupling ... Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage discusses his migration plan in collaboration with former prime minister Tony Abbott. “Tony Abbott is a hero figure,” Mr Farage said. “What we look at is the way that Abbott did it.”

The onion muncher is in the inspiration for Nigel, busy making racist and bigoted plans to emulate King Donald?

Any self-respecting person would pale at the thought, but it's honey to a man who, much like Tony Bleagh, is terrified by the thought of becoming Mr. Irrelevance, and so will sup with the likes of Viktor Orbán, just to stay in the authoritarian loop ...

Understandably, it’s exacerbating voter anxieties about cost of living and especially younger voters’ anxieties about their chances of buying a home and starting a family. Under such circumstances it’s only reasonable to crack down hard on irregular migration and to significantly reduce legal migration.
As well, with some groups of recent immigrants over-represented in crime and welfare statistics or in Palestine protests, there are anxieties about the impact of continuing high immigration on social cohesion. There should be a stronger insistence that all migrants fully and wholeheartedly commit to their new home’s values – along the lines of the Australian citizenship pledge in which newcomers declare their “allegiance to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey”.
Even if it goes against the grain of some communities, we really do have to insist that freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the equality of the sexes and respect for democracy under the rule of law are a fundamental part of the Australian way of life.
Something the US historically has been good at is reconciling a strong national identity with mass migration. For all that countries have in common, each one is unique and has a right to keep its character and to run immigration with this in mind. Unless migrants are readily steeped in the history and traditions of their new home – unless there’s a strong civic patriotism in the absence of an ethnic one – national stories can be lost and existing citizens can start to fear becoming strangers in their own countries.
It would be wrong to run an ethnically or religiously discriminatory immigration policy, but it’s more than reasonable to take into account values or language, as shown by the number of countries (including Britain and Australia) with citizenship tests.
Countries such as Australia should not have a high immigration intake because lots of foreigners would like to live here, so come on tourist visas and claim asylum; or as students or short-term workers expecting more or less automatically to gain residency and citizenship.
In the end, as with every other aspect of government, immigration policy should serve the national interest. It should make a country stronger and better by bringing in people who will be an asset to the country and add to the lives of its existing citizens.

At this point the reptiles dropped in an image designed to provoke, Anti-immigration protesters carry flags and placards in Sydney last week. Picture:Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Save Australia? Ah, but from what and from whom? From bigots and white Xian nationalists?

In his original presentation, the onion muncher hunted for a Wikimedia Commons image from ancient times in a way designed to provoke ...

The anarchists are wrong of course.

How much better this country would have been if we hadn't offered Poms ten pounds to head here. 

The result made too many of us wary of immigration, wary of making the native-born feel like strangers in their own neighbourhoods, while loons from the old country arrived with their destructive passions and their mad obsession with whiteness and notions of the Anglosphere...

Look at the impassioned feelings that can be aroused ...

What's needed is a better mechanism to detect rabble rousers and sh*t stirrers, and if they keep on with their destructive passions, finding a way to send them back to the olde country, where they can Nige on in their own Nigel way ...

What’s needed is a better mechanism to ensure that, other than short-term tourists from countries that will readily take their citizens back, all newcomers are making a contribution to their new home from day one.
The best way to make this happen would be to welcome as migrants people who have been offered a job that no Australian could reasonably fill, at a wage that’s clearly above the present market rate, perhaps with a foreign workers’ tax to be paid by the employer to ensure that there’s no incentive to import cheap foreign labour.
In my country, there has always been a ready welcome for newcomers who work hard, obey the rules and join Team Australia. Newcomers who fill a job from day one are not only making an immediate contribution to their chosen country but are on a sure path to integrate and ultimately to assimilate seamlessly into their new homeland.
In the end, every migrant chooses to migrate. If they come for the wrong reasons, it’s not their fault; it’s the fault of governments that don’t make sufficiently clear what’s expected of them. If the rate of migration is causing economic or social tension, again, it’s hardly the fault of the migrants but of the governments that have allowed in the wrong numbers with the wrong skill sets.
No one can be blamed for wanting the better life that the Anglosphere countries can provide to almost anyone from anywhere else. The fault is with governments that use immigration rather than reform to boost their economies and that fail to reinforce with newcomers how lucky they are to have joined the best countries on Earth.

At the end of the reptile presentation came this credit, a reminder of Australia's climate-denialist, NBN-wrecking shameful past...

Tony Abbott was the 28th prime minister of Australia.

The way it originally ended suggested that perhaps the reptiles had done the odd little nip and tuck ...

Was the use of "squarely" considered too square by the reptiles, even though it was scribbled by an Anglosphere square?

And what's with the reptiles not acknowledging the source of this drivel, and not providing a link to the original Substack post?

In the pond's case, it's easy enough, a desire not to drive traffic to a man who should become Mr Irrelevance. 

In the reptile case? Must keep the punters inside the hive mind. Once they realise that this sort of drivel can be found by wandering the full to overflowing internet, where might it all end?

As for supporting the OM's work, the pond would rather choke on its vomit in the noon day Tamworth sun, or better still enjoy an infallible Pope enjoying the current fuss relating to the onion muncher's old party ...