The pond regrets that earlier in the day it didn't have room to celebrate yet another lead, headline-topping EXCLUSIVE from the reptiles, though it probably only interests those sparrows who dwell in the south ...
Fears over federal cash gap hit state Labor’s Big Build rail project
Secret documents reveal the Victorian Premier’s top officials feared the $34.5bn Suburban Rail Loop was at risk after Canberra refused to commit another $9bn in funding.
By Damon Johnston
A teaser trailer will suffice, because the pond senses it's just a reptile storm in a teacup ...
The pond also deeply regretted missing our Henry who turned up late to the pond's early morning party.
Better late than never the pond says, though it did provide a link earlier in the day...
The header, as link: United Nations’ Palestine hope is not vision, but grand delusion, All the razzamatazz in the world can’t hide the fact that there is nothing to recognise.
The caption for our Henry's lead snap: A displaced Palestinian child walks on the rubble of a destroyed building at the Bureij camp for refugees in the central Gaza Strip on Monday. Picture: AFP
Would such an image move our Henry?
Of course not ... our Henry is terribly keen on ethnic displacement and the ethnic cleansing and the genocide ...
Well, let them eat subsidised croissants: the show must go on. And with Anthony Albanese, Keir Starmer and Mark Carney’s triple act adding to the razzmatazz, the spectacle was less about vision than about collective hallucination.
Not that Albanese did anything to give the reality principle a look-in. Instead, he got his basic facts wrong.
No error, among the many, is more telling and egregious than Albanese’s repeated claim that the United Nations “created” two states, Israel and Palestine. But the UN neither has, nor has it ever had, any power to bring a state into existence. It may recommend, recognise, or admit to membership, but statehood has always depended on other processes.
The contention is even more starkly incorrect in the case of Israel and Palestine. As James Crawford, Australia’s most eminent international jurist, carefully explained in The Creation of States in International Law (2006), the General Assembly Resolution of November 29, 1947 “recommended the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states; but the resolution had no binding force, and it did not create either state”.
At this point the reptiles inserted a snap of the perfidious French leader, French President Emmanuel Macron has more to worry about than the recognition of Palestine. Picture: AFP
And also at this point the pond will admit to the main reason it dragged our Henry back out of the archive for a Friday arvo trot.
As is the pond's habit whenever thinking of our Henry, the pond likes to insert a counterweight, a counterpoint, by featuring moments from something from somewhere, such as a Haaretz story, this one to be found in full here ...
What an interesting distraction from what our Henry's saying.
Israel should support a Palestinian state?
Of all the nerve and cheek ... and so the pond will likely aim for another distraction a little further on, as our Henry really gets into gear ...
Meanwhile, “the areas allotted to the Arab state were occupied by Transjordan and Egypt (so that) no independent Arab Palestinian state was established”. And even after the creation of the Palestinian Authority, “the absence of effective government has prevented the emergence of Palestine as a state”.
The difficulty, of course, was that Crawford, being old-fashioned, believed there was a determinate relationship between words and things: to “recognise” that what is on my plate is a cupcake is to assert that it is indeed a cupcake, not that I wish, hope or dream that it will one day become a cupcake.
In exactly the same way, to recognise that a polity is a state is to confirm that it possesses statehood’s defining attributes. State recognition is, in other words, a declaratory act: it is the act by which other states acknowledge a factual situation.
The question of precisely what attributes a polity must meet to qualify for that recognition is relatively recent. Until the late 18th century, “recognition” centred not on the nature of the polity but on dynastic legitimacy: hence the wars of Spanish Succession (1701-1714) and of Austrian Succession (1740-1748).
Will those splendid references appease our henry devotees?
Possibly, though the pond finds them a tend forced.
They might even require an amendment to the first law of our Henry: “There is no argument that cannot be bolstered by citing long-deceased irrelevancies offering no useful insights to the matters under debate.”
Our Henry attempted to prove the scientific validity of this law by proceeding to drag in other irrelevant matters, not to mention good old Burke (oh he'll get a mention alright):
In effect, the “family of nations” now had to extend beyond Europe, including eventually to Africa and Asia. But what criteria would determine its membership, notably once it had to deal with polities without a heritage of “Christian morality”? The answer, formalised in the second half of the 19th century, lay in the much maligned, and even more poorly understood, “Standard of Civilisation”.
That standard was, as Gerrit Gong brilliantly showed long ago, the outcome of international lawyers’ “heroic” efforts to “expand the domain of international law to include the non-European countries which had not before fallen within its aegis”. Its core requirements for recognition were a “stable government whose writ runs over the whole country”, a “certain minimum of efficiency in running the state machinery” and “a domestic system of courts, codes and published laws which guarantee legal justice”.
At this point the reptiles interrupted with another snap, designed to incite, Head of the Palestine Mission to the UK, Husam Zomlot, reacts after watching a broadcast of Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer formally recognising the Palestinian state on September 21. Picture: AFP
So the pond thought it could offer another burst of its own distraction...
Led by the Communist bloc and its fellow travellers, the UN General Assembly therefore passed a series of resolutions declaring that no polity could be refused recognition on the basis of “civilisation”; that is, of even a manifest “inadequacy of political, economic, social, or educational preparedness”.
The result, wrote Georg Schwarzenberger, one of the post-war’s leading international lawyers, was that “doctrine reached the other extreme”, with states being “under a legal duty to recognise even uncivilised states”, thus ensuring the international system would reflect the world’s worst standards, not its best. But at least the criterion of effective control over territory, and the associated requirement that the candidate polity exercise a monopoly over the legitimate use of force within its territory, remained somewhat intact.
Until this week, that is. Conforming to the postmodern zeitgeist of the age, what matters now is no longer what a polity actually is but what Third World rulers, no matter how duplicitous, corrupt or incompetent, promise wilfully credulous Western leaders it is some day going to be.
Promises were, however, made to be broken. We pre-postmodern types, who remain stubbornly convinced that there is such a thing as reality, therefore continue to believe in testing their credibility. And the conclusions, drawn from the World Bank and Freedom House datasets, are hardly encouraging.
Then came another distraction, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has joined France and Australia in the push for a two-state solution. Picture: AFP
So the pond decided to compound the distractions...
And so on, but the pond must return to our Henry for a final outburst ...
The chances that the region’s failed polities – and the datasets have classed Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority as a failed polity ever since he came to power – will remain failed polities are even greater. And failed polities’ record on curbing terrorist groups is worse yet, as Lebanon’s complete inability to implement its commitment to disarming Hezbollah, which has just threatened to reignite Lebanon’s devastating civil war, vividly shows.
Those results are unsurprising: if failed polities survive, it is because they serve the interests of powerful elites, which, precisely because of the misery into which they plunge their hapless populations, can extract vast rents from foreign aid. That doesn’t mean change is impossible; what it does mean is that Abbas’s promises should have been treated with caution.
But caution wasn’t what Albanese and his ilk had in mind. After all, their talent is for stagecraft, not statecraft. And they are not the ones who will have to live next door to the new baby. The pity is that the consequences, including for Palestinians, are likely to be a tragedy. As for the show itself, it was a farce.
Roll on the ethnic cleansing and the genocide, and our Henry might yet loll on a beach chair at the beach in the new Gaza Riviera, spouting references to Burke and ancient disputes, while Palestinians can loll somewhere out of sight in a desert somewhere ...
So it goes, and so to the bonus, because Killer was also out and about this day, and the pond deliberately excluded him from its morning session because he was banging on about Covid yet again as Killer is want to do ...
Some might just settle for a cartoon before departing quikstix ...
Braver souls made of sterner Killer stuff will enter into the world where Killer is karping about kovid yet again, as only IPA economists can do ...
The header: Brett Sutton’s stunning Covid-19 lockdown admission can’t be swept aside, If royal commissions into pink batts, casino licences and Robodebt justified their great cost and sweeping powers, surely the nation’s Covid response warrants one, too.
The caption: 2023 Victorian of the Year Brett Sutton observed this week that many Covid measures were “probably not necessary”. Picture: Jake Nowakowski
Killer was in good karping form, though the pond found it a tad disappointing ...
If pink batts, casino licences and Robodebt justified their great cost and sweeping powers, surely the nation’s Covid response, which squandered hundreds of billions of dollars, wrecked the lives and livelihoods of thousands, and trashed supposedly fundamental human rights, warrants one, too.
Former Victorian chief health officer Brett Sutton’s courageous observation this week that many of the draconian Covid measures were “probably not necessary” should trigger fresh calls for a proper inquiry, as Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay did earlier this year.
It’s far from too late; New Zealand, Britain, Italy and the Netherlands are still in the midst of theirs.
The Labor government’s self-congratulatory Covid “inquiry”, published last year, authored by individuals who by and large backed the novel response, was a whitewash, written by public servants and academics, not independent retired judges, who naturally disinclined to upset their political masters.
“People should be proud of what we achieved during the pandemic … Australia had lesser health and economic impacts in the pandemic than most other countries around the world … because we had people who worked unbelievably hard and made difficult decisions – all in the country’s best interests,” the inquiry concluded.
Why was the pond disappointed?
Well the reptiles arranged for a good Krogering, which the pond understands is roughly equivalent to a rogering with a pineapple, Former Victorian Liberal Party president Michael Kroger discusses former Victorian chief health officer Brett Sutton admitting the state's health measures were probably never necessary. “It was so extreme here and it was not based on medical advice,” Mr Kroger told Sky News Presenter Gabriella Power. “Victoria’s still suffering years later.”
But at no point did Killer or the reptiles think of offering medical advice on the current medical matter requiring their urgent attention ...
Stat, reptiles, watch your medical shows, stat ...
Never mind, Killer was laser sharp on ancient Covid history ...
“Maybe we will agree as a society that we never want to do that (lockdown) again. I’m OK with that,” Sutton told Neil Mitchell in an hour-long interview reviewing the sense of Victoria’s 262-day, world-beating lockdown. “There are other ways to manage stuff.”
Indeed, the rational and numerate among us, who were publicly excoriated, were OK with that in 2020. After all, the nation’s 2019 pandemic plan, still sitting awkwardly on the Health Department website at the time of writing, specifically recommended against workplace and school closures.
“Compliance with most measures by the individual will be implemented on a voluntary basis,” it stressed numerous times.
The thoughtful 232-page document, which doesn’t canvass elbow bumping or “rings of steel”, also stressed the importance of proportionality, and defined “low-severity” pandemics as those where “the majority of cases are likely to experience mild to moderate clinical features … (while) people in at-risk groups may experience more severe illness”. That sounds like Covid-19.
A proper Covid inquiry must investigate why our response deviated so drastically from the pandemic plan, along with dispelling persistent misinformation around Covid death rates. Sutton, for all his commendable reflection, still believes the Covid-19 death rate was 1.5-2 per cent. Yet the average global infection fatality rate was 0.15 per cent by February 2021, even before the less deadly Omicron variant emerged, according to internationally renowned epidemiologist John Ionnadis in a May 2021 peer-reviewed article.
Even Donald Trump, who in early March 2020 controversially predicted on Fox News the IFR would be “way under 1 per cent”, was better informed than our health experts.
Why did the measures in Australia last so excruciatingly long? When Dan Andrews’ police were firing rubber bullets at Australians and tackling people to the ground for being outside maskless in September 2021, I was sitting in a crowded cafe in Miami watching the horror unfold. The rest of the world had moved on, why hadn’t we?, and how can we change institutions to more easily puncture local hysteria next time
According to a newly published study in the latest Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, the young, healthy women typically used by the Australian and other governments in advertising campaign – to scare people into compliance – faced a greater risk of dying from a once-every-17,000-year “civilisation-ending” volcanic eruption. Should such blatant propaganda, however effective, be permissible in the next pandemic?
There's no Covid death that's not a good death in Killer's loving Covid world.
At this point the reptiles reverted to a lizard Oz classic, a deep, dire fear of the truly terrifying dictator Dan, Former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews was at the helm during the 262-day lockdown. Picture: Andrew Henshaw
The pond was left wondering if it would ever get a second opinion on more urgent matters ...
Never mind, Killer was winding up, finally with a final finally ...
Australia wasn’t the only nation to egregiously overreact to Covid, but we remain bizarrely smug about it, despite the mounting body of international evidence that suggests severe measures did very little to “save lives”, and caused immense and ongoing socio-economic and even health harms.
A proper inquiry shouldn’t be about pointscoring – I wrote to Sutton this week praising him for his candour. It’s not easy to admit error.
Australia set dangerous precedents during the pandemic, which unless explicitly jettisoned will dog our prosperity and reputation. Indeed, new WHO health regulations came into effect last week that will require Australia to crack down on “misinformation and disinformation”, and toughen digital surveillance of citizens. The US, Italy and Israel among others had the good sense to reject them as an affront to sovereignty and civil liberties.
“I don’t think people would wear it (lockdowns) again,” veteran broadcaster Mitchell mused during the interview.
But if Australia’s unique cocktail of coercive madness isn’t formally disavowed, via a formal, dispassionate inquiry, the working assumption is surely that it will all happen again.
The chance of a Covid-like pandemic in the next couple of decades is about 50 per cent, according to the University of California Davis’s Centre for Global Development. This is far from an academic issue.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
Say what? He's still agitated about coercive madness?
And yet in almost the same breath, he purports to be worried about some future pandemic?
But surely the way is clear should one arrive. The pond has read enough Killer to know Killer's prescription for a Killer response.
Whatever you do, don't wear a mask, especially when out and about in public. The more you share, the sooner there'll be herd immunity, and think of those plague deaths as just a way to produce a Renaissance for those who survived medieval times.
Equally important, avoid any vaccine like the plague because as certain as catching the mumps, the measles or polio, you'll end up autistic.
If you must take anything, take some Ivermectin, but please remember to make sure the dosage is proper veterinary-approved horse strength - sufficient paste to treat one 1250 lb horse at the recommended dose rate of 91 mcg ivermectin per lb (200 mcg/kg) body weight .
Just as important? Remember to ignore all advice to the contrary ...
Follow Killer's medical advice, and there's a goodly chance that if you don't manage to kill yourself, you might at least manage to kill someone else.
Follow the golden rule: if it's good enough for King Donald, it's good enough for you, and when in dire medical doubt, always seek the advice of a cartoonist ...
Perhaps some kind soul might explain to Killer the concept of “the benefits of hindsight”.
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