In which our Henry goes war monger, and Killer of the IPA cultivates division in his usual killing way ...

 

The magic has left the pond. Once upon a time, the pond fancied itself as a portal into the reptile hive mind, but now, thanks to the archive, anyone can peek and pry ...

For example, this morning petulant Peta's post was hanging around like a bad smell at the top of the extreme far right, ma ...

The pond can't imagine anyone would be intrigued, but no matter, there she is in the archive ...

Coalition to pay for Ley’s bungling over Price
Far from showing leadership, opposition Liberal leader Sussan Ley has failed to manage one of the few stars she has on her team.
By Peta Credlin

Columnist

The real point came in the archived header, the chance for more ratbag mischief making, Jacinta Price now given her voice after getting dumped from frontbench

So the competition is still on. Which lasts until Xmas?

Also on the extreme far right Ben was packing it in ...

Massive overreach by Beijing shocks island’s MPs
That the Solomon Islands allowed the Chinese police to start collecting villagers’ fingerprints shows it is far too meek and trusting when dealing with the might of the communist state.
By Ben Packham

What about in the alleged "news" section?

Inevitably the killing of Kirk dominated proceedings, but the reptiles also found space for their usual climate alarmism ...

EXCLUSIVE
Climate modeller expects Labor to ‘lower 2035 target’
Anthony Albanese faces pressure to deliver an ambitious 2035 climate target with its former forecasting agency weighing in with its own verdict on Labor’s expected goal.
By Perry Williams

And Ben was still packing it, in a state of Mao-hysteria ...

EXCLUSIVE
China’s insidious grip on the Pacific sees Mao-era initiative inflicted on Solomons
A Chinese program in Solomon Islands is fingerprinting the nation’s citizens and getting them to fill out household registration cards under the guise of ‘community policing’.
By Ben Packham

Relax Ben, they're just following the example of King Donald's USA...America Is Now A 'Show Your Papers' State, The obvious end point of the Supreme Court’s logic is something normally associated with fascist regimes.

Columbia Law School professor Elora Mukherjee told HuffPost that, effectively, the only way for people to protect themselves is to carry around documents proving their legal status. “Those who have documentation, whether lawful permanent residents or DACA holders,” she said, “they can carry proof of their status in the U.S.”
The result is obvious: “This decision makes the U.S. a ‘show me your papers’ country for the overwhelming majority of people, and those who will be targeted, by and large, are going to be people who are not white,” she said.

You know ...

And so on, and so back to the extreme far right, where our Henry set the pace with a nice bout of war-mongering, amid a "there are good King Donalds on both sides" routine ...

It's a measure of the pond's undying affection for the old curmudgeon and useless pedant that our Henry still gets the legacy pond treatment.

The header: Donald Trump understands the role of war in helping keep peace in our world, Donald Trump has no shortage of flaws. There is, however, one skill at which he excels: puncturing comfortable illusions.

The caption for a snap of that signature: Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth in the oval office. Picture: AP /Alex Brandon

Oh dear, all that signature sharpie snap did was trigger the pond ...

Quick, on with the war mongering ...

All too predictably, last week’s announcement that Donald Trump had issued an Executive Order restoring the historic name “Department of War” as a secondary title for the Department of Defence provoked howls of derision. But there is no lack of substance to Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth’s statement, made at the signing ceremony, that his department’s focus now had to be on delivering “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality”.

Really?

No lack of substance? 

Really, hole in bucket repair man? Sounding like a two bit rapper who gave up the grog so he could pop a little ice is sustance?

A drunk and womaniser boasting of restoring the warrior ethos: “We are gonna go on offense, not just on defense, maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. We’re gonna raise up warriors, not just defenders.”

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

Never mind, Hegseth's rap was deeply risible and enjoyed by all, but it's a measure of our Henry's marked decline into a war-mongering senility that he should fall for that routine.

Whether the department will, in fact, be renamed depends on congress, as its official name is specified by National Security Act Amendments of 1949. Nor was its name before that legislation the Department of War. Rather, its immediate predecessor, established under the National Security Act of 1947, was simply called the National Military Establishment, which incorporated the army, navy and air force into a structure headed by a secretary of defence.
The creation of the National Military Establishment was intended to both overcome co-ordination problems that had afflicted the American armed forces in World War II, particularly in the Pacific, and to secure tangible efficiencies. However, the 1947 legislation was poorly designed to meet those goals. With president Harry Truman and congress determined to avoid anything that smacked of a Prussian “General Staff”, it vested virtually no power in the office of the secretary of defence and shied away from strengthening the decision-making capabilities of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was only with the 1949 amendments that today’s departmental structure began to take shape.

Forget the billions this renaming folly might consume - all that Uncle Leon saved and more - and the stupidity of carrying on like an advertising agency wanting a different spit and polish, here have a serve of Freya imagining King Donald was about to give Vlad the sociopath the licking he deserved, Sky News host Freya Leach discusses United States President Donald Trump renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War. “Trump has renamed the Pentagon from the Department of Defense to the Department of War,” Ms Leach said. “The West tried being weak … but guess what, our enemies didn’t, all that’s happened is we’ve become weak while they’ve become strong.”

In your dreams, Freya, when it comes to dictators or the Gaza genocide or the bombing of an ally by a rogue ethnic cleansing nation, he'll always be Captain Bonespurs, the TACO man, no matter how he fantasises about being in Apocalypse Now ...

Like the desire not to appear “Prussian”, naming the new structure “the Department of Defence” symbolised the era. George Washington had established a Department of War in 1789. But by 1947, and even more so when the amendments were passed in 1949, “war” had become disreputable. Stating that “We are preparing for peace, not for war”, Truman agreed with secretary of state George Marshall that American policy should be “based on the assumption that there would not be war and that we should not plunge into preparations which would bring about the very thing we were taking steps to prevent”.
At the heart of those convictions was Truman’s belief that the Charter of the United Nations –“humanity’s best hope to outlaw the scourge of war” – had made “aggressive war illegal”. To join the UN, said the charter, states had to be “peace-loving”; they had to pledge to use force solely in self-defence and, even then, only until the dispute was addressed by the Security Council. The UN was, in other words, to have a monopoly over the legitimate exercise of interstate violence, which it was to deploy strictly observing international humanitarian law, including the law of war.

As if to rub in just how nonsensical our Henry was being, the reptiles inserted a reminder of those lax, slack soldiers lolling along, accompanied by a squeaky tank, President Donald Trump attends a military parade commemorating the Army's 250th anniversary in June. Picture: AP /Julia Demaree Nikhinson

And where's a mention of Caesar's Gallic Wars, or the 300 Spartans,  or any of our Henry's usual motifs?

Instead of Thucydides, the best he could do in the next gobbet was relive the Korean war ...

With those beliefs in the air, no government was keen on having a ministry or department of war. Nothing better reflected the USSR’s love of peace, Stalin proclaimed in early 1946, than its decision to rename the People’s Commissariat of War (NKO) the Ministry of the Armed Forces, which then became the Ministry of Defence. France promptly followed suit, as did Italy and newly independent India. Eventually, every significant country – no matter how bellicose – fell into line, with only Brazil holding out until 1967.
Yet it was clear “the scourge of war” had no intention of disappearing. Already in early 1947, Mao Zedong had decided that “the main contradiction in today’s world is that between China and the United States”, creating tensions over the balance of power in Asia that he believed could only be resolved through the use of force. He therefore repeatedly assured Stalin and Kim Il-sung that China would join North Korea’s attack on the South, which, Mao claimed, was an opportunity to inflict a humiliating defeat on the “US imperialist ambition of aggression”.
In the event, China’s intervention in the Korean War, which cost the lives of at least 150,000 Chinese soldiers, did force a stalemate. But the significance of the Korean War did not just lie in inaugurating an endless sequence of blood-soaked conflicts; it was also the first time the Communists, backed by an army of prominent dupes, accused the Western forces of committing the freshly enacted crime of genocide.

The reptiles insisted on emphasising the folly, as drones circled in Poland, Pictures in a hallway of the Pentagon, show Pete Hegseth and Steve Feinberg’s new titles. Picture: AFP

It's easy to look tough in a suit?

Instead of simply ensuring South Korea’s self-defence, said the Communist-aligned World Peace Council, the Western forces, including those sent by Australia, had “overshadowed even the Nazi atrocities” by dropping bombs “stuffed with insects infected with communicable diseases” on North Korean kindergartens, hospitals and refugee camps.
Those contentions were entirely concocted, as historians Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg have shown. Far from suffering genocidal attacks, the North Korean regime, acting on Chinese advice, had injected helpless prisoners with deadly cholera bacteria. Having left them to die in agony, it then provided tissue samples from their corpses to supposedly independent human rights investigators. With the investigators endorsing the Communists’ claims, the grisly charade proved a propaganda triumph, fuelling massive anti-American protests worldwide.

The pond supposes that dwelling in the past is easier than dealing with a sociopathic dictator or two in the present, as the reptiles trotted out the long forgotten Swiss bank account man, Former Labor senator Graham Richardson says US President Donald Trump is sending a “tough guy” message to the world. US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to rename the Department of Defence to the ‘Department of War’. The Department of War was established by George Washington in 1789.

A tough guy, with a tough act? Did they all miss that 'toon?

Never mind, it was time for our Henry to wrap up proceedings ...

That success, which confirmed the shock value of accusations of genocide, cemented a pattern that was to be repeated time and again. Indeed, thanks to the development of new media channels, charges that the West was responsible for war crimes became ever louder and more insistent.
As that happened, argues Harvard’s David Kennedy in his Of Law and War (2006), the accusations “left the world of legal validity” – for what mattered was no longer their juridical accuracy but their usefulness to “constituencies with political clout” that could deploy the accusations “strategically”. Nor were the beneficiaries the civilians international humanitarian law was intended to protect. The gains went instead to the agents of violence, including terrorists, who showed nothing but scorn for the “normative universe” on which the rules they so loudly invoked were based.
But the consequences have extended far beyond propaganda. As William Booth and Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg, two of the most prominent scholars of international humanitarian law, conclude in The Law of War (2018), it is in no small part because of those accusations’ effectiveness in mobilising opposition to the fight against terrorism that the West’s adversaries have “increasingly intermingled themselves with the civilian population, using that population as shields”. The result is that “casualties among civilians have continued to rise unacceptably, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of total casualties”.
That, not the make-believe of the UN Charter, is the world in which we live. Not a world from which war has been banished but one in which it proliferates. Not a world in which rules protect victims but one in which they shield barbaric aggressors. And not a world in which it is not the weak reed of international law that will deter adversaries but the manifest willingness and ability to fight and to win.
Those are the realities last week’s announcement places into the spotlight. Yes, the 47th American president has no shortage of flaws. There is, however, one skill at which he excels: puncturing comfortable illusions. By replacing “War” for “Defence”, and “maximum lethality” for “tepid legality”, Donald Trump has done more for the cause of peace than the launchers of moral thunderbolts who endlessly mouth its name.

And so, inevitably to the Kirk matter, and there was no shortage of reptile pundits out and about on parade.

The pond was reluctant to go there, on the basis that (a) it had absolutely no time for Kirk and his ratbag incitements, (b) absolutely no time for anyone who thinks the killing fields are any kind of solution, (c) absolutely no time for anyone seeking to use the killing for political leverage, especially when failing to mention Kirk's own role in promoting the gun culture which helped lead to his death, and (d) absolutely no interest in the various conspiracy theories that have erupted, including but not limited to the notion that King Donald arranged the hit to finally bury the Epstein matter.

In short ...

But this being an observation of the hive mind, there's a price to pay, so here we go...

CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSINATION
Why does our obsession with nostalgia stop at patriotism?
Being the first with a quip online about a politically motivated murder in front of thousands shows how deplorable we have become as a society.
By Jenna Clarke
Associate Editor

Jenna stayed in the archive for the pond, where the header revealed her game, Charlie Kirk assassination: Right-wing commentator’s biggest crime was his love for his country

Actually Jenna, his biggest crime was sh*t-stirring and sh*t-posting and sh*t-storming for a living ...a servile, sycophant to King Donald, while grifting in his own way ...

The pond realises that's speaking ill of the dead, but the pond is just as happy to speak ill of the craven Craven ...

COMMENTARY by Greg Craven
The brutal hypocrisy of the Left's ultimate cancellation

The crazier radicals of the nutso Left are already overtly celebrating the slaughter of right-wing warrior Charlie Kirk.

Being a barking mad Catholic himself, this was the level of the craven Craven's contribution ...

...lesser forms of elimination are routinely deployed. College professors are forced out for uncongenial views on race and historiography. Public figures are vilified for political deviations. Artists have careers destroyed at the least departure from political correctitude.
The fundamental issue was whether Charlie Kirk should have been allowed to speak at all. He certainly was right-wing. He undeniably was a Trump enthusiast. But he was not a lunatic. He did not attend Nazi rallies or propose compulsory reversal of transgender surgery. This speaks to one of the intractable problems of today’s political and cultural debate. You do not have to do much to be characterised as a dispensable madman of the far right. Tony Abbott, for example, was merely a pretty intense figure of standard conservatism. Yet he was characterised as the “Mad Monk”, a bigoted trope calumny, marking him as an extremist Catholic who would bring the Inquisition to cringing Australian homes.
On the left, however, anything goes. In the US, Bernie Sanders can propose economic suicide and be praised as a prophet. Here, Penny Wong can reprimand a besieged Israel and be applauded as a diplomat.
Charlie Kirk made two mistakes: one was to be a man of the right; the other was to get shot. The lead bullet and the ideological bullet inextricably linked.

Actually a devotion to everyone having a real bullet in a real gun might have had something to do with it.

The very same day there was yet another school shooting in the endless, mindless parade of guns and deaths in America ...

Where are the thoughts and prayers for them? And all those who went before them, and all those who will follow after them?

And so to Killer, because no one loves the killing fields more than Killer ...

The header: Kirk killing proves him right - it is dangerous to challenge the left, The shooting of Charlie Kirk vindicated his warning that the far-left ideology embedded in universities is becoming not just dogmatic, but dangerous.

The caption: Charlie Kirk reached more young Americans on his phone in an hour than most senators could in a month.Picture: The Salt Lake Tribune via Reuters.

Speaking of AI, as the pond often does, the good news is that all this is fake news...

No wonder the United States is comprehensively stuffed, but Killer is on hand to help with more stuffing ...

On the day he was mercilessly slain on a university campus in Utah, Charlie Kirk was sitting beneath a tent emblazoned with “Prove Me Wrong” when he was shot in cold blood by a sniper.
The hugely talented and influential conservative died doing what he loved: persuading young Americans, through civil debate, of the virtues of limited government, free markets, free speech – and warning them of the dangers of the intolerant “woke” ideology that has come to dominate universities across the country. They obviously couldn’t prove him wrong through argument, so they shot him. In doing so, they vindicated his warning that the far-left ideology embedded in universities was becoming not just dogmatic, but dangerous.
While obsessively pursuing diversity of skin colour, the woke left maniacally seeks to erase diversity of thought – once the hallmark of a university education.
“Charlie Kirk was assassinated because he was winning. He was changing a generation. Turning young people toward truth, faith, and country. That made him unstoppable, and that made him a target of evil,” said fellow conservative influencer Benny Johnson.
It is difficult to overstate how central Kirk had become to the American right. He was not merely a campus rabble-rouser or culture warrior but a genuine organiser, strategist, and communicator who combined charisma with a relentless work ethic.

At this point the reptiles introduced Danica into the discussion, Sky News host Danica De Giorgio discusses the views which Charlie Kirk “stood for” following his assassination in Utah. “The left, they pedal this line that they’re very tolerant and they’re very accepting,” Ms De Giorgio said. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, what we say today was the so-called tolerant left at work. “It’s all absolute BS.”

Now that's how to tar everyone with a barking mad fundamentalism, but you'd expect that of barking mad reptile fundamentalists. 

It's impossible to argue with that sort of smearing. If you recall the intolerant right, and examples, such as the Oklahoma bombing,  (c. 168 dead, and with a Waco spin-off as the sequel) you're just joining in the sneering and the smearing ...

Speaking of that, please, go on Killer ...

Almost as if in natural reaction to the brazen bias of the legacy media in favour of Democrats, social media has given rise to a dozen or so powerful, articulate, fiercely independent conservative influencers – including the late Kirk, Johnson, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder and Tucker Carlson.
Each commands an audience larger than almost any elected official. The Democratic leader in congress, Hakeem Jeffries, and Republican Speaker Mike Johnson each have about a million followers on X. Kirk, at just 31, had 5.5 million. He reached more young Americans on his phone in an hour than most senators could in a month.

Does Killer realise he's actually appearing in, scribbling for legacy media, and what's more, legacy media with a brazen bias in favour of conservatism?

Apparently not, delusion is a key to Killer's IPA core, and a desire to keep the company of the likes of Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan

At this point the pond wished that the reptiles had access to a cartoonist of the immortal Rowe kind ...

It's all in the details, details that Killer of the IPA elides over, like this gun-nut enabler ...

... and these gun-nut enablers ...

Sorry, back to Killer of the IPA, working hard on martyrdom ...

He was arguably the greatest threat to Democrats’ electoral prospects. 

Arguably? He was arguably not, but do go on ...

From scratch, he built Turning Point USA, which he had led since age 18, specifically to visit schools and universities to advocate for conservative values – politically and socially. Unlike many Republican figures who merely complained about the cultural left, he actually set foot in hostile territory and debated them face-to-face, often winning converts. For years, he toured relentlessly, spending more time on campuses than most students.
Kirk was hardly a shallow MAGA mouthpiece. He often showed nuanced economic thinking and a deep concern for the plight of younger Americans that could be perceived as even left-leaning. “There is economic nihilism that has set in to a lot of this next generation, where they are not participating in any of the upside right now … they’re only seeing the downside. They’re seeing their apartments get smaller … rents go up … groceries get more expensive,” he told Carlson on a recent podcast.
“Why is the Right so blind to the suffering of the young people that just gave you a Senate majority?” he added, while taking a swipe at banks for saddling youth with debt, and Australia’s Afterpay, now a big brand in the US, for encouraging them to live beyond their means.
Democrats can no longer count on the young – whose formative school, university and early career years were wrecked by Democrats’ harebrained lockdowns – to mindlessly back them in droves. Kirk reminded them who had locked them in their rooms, closed their gyms, destroyed their small businesses and saddled them with record inflation, all while claiming to care about “equity”.

Then came Annelise, with an awkward insight, Sky News Washington Correspondent Annelise Nielsen discusses Charlie Kirk’s debates on college campuses. “Apparently, he did a tour in the UK and it was a lot less successful, because the students there are better at debating,” Ms Nielson told Sky News host Paul Murray. “Apparently, in the US, it was really just shooting fish in the barrel.”

Well yes, that was Kirk's method, and never mind the uneasy notion of shooting fish in a barrel.

Hush Annelise, enough already with the mangled metaphors, don't interrupt Killer of the IPA ... following the universal rule. 

If you can't bring out the kraken, bring out the Biden ...

In 2020, Joe Biden won women under 30 by 30 percentage points. By 2024, Kamala Harris’s entire campaign warning that Trump would crush women’s rights, including abortion, cut that margin to just 18 points. Not enough sisters believed the lie.
But the shift among young men – Kirk’s core audience – was seismic. Biden won men under 30 by 15 points in 2020. Trump won them by 14 in 2024: an unprecedented 29-point swing in just one cycle. It was the biggest generational partisan realignment in modern US history, and Kirk helped engineer it.
Unquestionably, Kirk helped deliver victory to Trump, who honoured him in a White House video soon after his death, calling him a “patriot and martyr for truth and freedom”. His death marks the most significant successful political assassination in 50 years. What his murder truly represents is the moment America’s campus culture war turned literally deadly – when words were replaced with bullets.
“Do you know how many transgender American mass shooters there have been over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked – the last question Kirk would ever hear. “Too many,” he replied, moments before he was shot.

Actually there's a different answer to that question ...

In short, statistically normal, if you accept that gun violence and the killing fields are as normal as apple pie.

And so on, as the reptiles remained fixated on Joe and Kamala ...In 2020, Joe Biden won women under 30 by 30 percentage points. By 2024, Kamala Harris cut that margin to just 18 points.

And so back to Killer for some final Killer thoughts...

After every high-profile murder in the US, the legacy media waits nervously to learn the race, gender or sexuality of the perpetrator before deciding how to cover it. They’ll be desperately hoping this one wasn’t trans. Normally, they’d be praying for a white male – but perhaps not today.
The media is already reeling from its humiliation over ignoring the brutal murder of a young Ukrainian refugee on a train in Charlotte by a deranged black man with 14 prior convictions, who reportedly muttered “I got that white girl” as he staggered away drenched in blood. This came after thousands of articles for months vilified Daniel Penny, who in 2023 accidentally killed a black man harassing train passengers.
Kirk had been leading the pushback. “We have been propagandised by liars and fakers in the media to believe that America is a vicious, racist country and indiscriminate attacks on black people by whites happen all the time. But the numbers tell the truth. Black attacks on white people happen three times more often than white-on-black crime, despite blacks being only 13 per cent of the population. Why won’t the media just tell the truth?” he said on social media.
At least we will soon know more about Kirk’s killer than we ever learned about Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks – whose name and story seem to have all but vanished from public discourse.

After all that, the pond felt like taking a break with a bit of classical music and a classy period look ...

 

What a relief, to be able to smile, and here's another smile, one that's passed under the reptiles' front page radar, but brought to mind thanks to the infallible Pope ...