In which the pond is distracted before settling down to a serve of our Henry and Killer of the IPA ...

It sounded promising, it sounded good, even though phrasing it as a question sounded very silly, Is the Murdoch empire using dirty tricks to crush competition? (*archive link)

But on closer inspection, it was a bit of a dud, if only because the complaints stem from Newsmax, suggesting it's a bit like Alex Jones having a feud with allegedly demon-possessed Owen Shroyer...

...According to the complaint, Fox used Disruptor to create thousands of fake social media accounts, or “sock puppets”, which, at Briganti’s behest, spread smears and posted negative comments about Tantaros.
Newsmax claims Fox has a long history of exploiting its market power over must-have television content to extract favourable terms from distributors in carriage negotiations for Fox News.
It provides the 2019 example of Fox pulling its channels from DISH just before the start of a new season of Thursday Night Football. It then cites a 2020 dispute with Roku that occurred days before Fox Sports was scheduled to stream the Super Bowl. In 2022, during negotiations with DirecTV, Fox threatened to black out much of its sports programming one day before broadcasting the US-Netherlands World Cup match. Fox has threatened to pull access to Fox Sports from Optimum viewers just as the Yankees entered the 2022 playoffs.
The legal filing alleges that in each of these instances, Fox was engaged in negotiations with these entities, and each time it used the same deliberate strategy: by timing threats and blackouts around highly anticipated games, Fox mobilised its loyal and passionate sports audience as a pressure campaign against distributors.

Big deal, the dirty digger didn't earn his nickname by trying to pass as a clean digger. 

The man's been a shameless rogue throughout his piratical career. And as for Newsmax, a pox on both their far right houses, and they may do as much damage to each other in the courts as they can manage.

On the upside, it now seems everyone can safely say that on the balance of probabilities, Ben Roberts-Smith likely committed war crimes, including murder (though perhaps one of the murdered might not find it such an upside). 

It's another big big win for Kerry Stokes, to add to previous big wins.

What else before moving on to the main event, it being a red letter our Henry day?

Well CL in Crikey (sorry, paywall) provided irresistible news that the pond would never have found elsewhere - the idea of finding, and then attempting to read an onion muncher post in the wild being a safe way to nausea.

Breaking a bad Abbott: Former prime minister Tony Abbott is proving himself a master of new media, having started not only an extremely insightful podcast but now also a Substack.
His first post is a collection of geopolitical musings, mainly notable because it gives the impression — and to be fair, he’s far from the only former PM to do this — that he was never himself in power. He also describes “the ayatollahs’ apocalyptic mission to establish a global caliphate”, implying he’s mistaken the Shia theocracy of Iran — who, for all their many international outrages and human rights abuses, have never proposed such a thing — with the Sunni extremists of ISIS. This is worse when you remember Abbott himself was prime minister in 2014 — during the awful culmination of Daesh’s nightmarish spread across Syria and Iraq, and the appointment of then leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as “caliph”.
Abbott then continues in the vein of his post-parliament doings: talking about China’s place in world affairs as though he never played any role in them. His terror at China’s growing strength is clear: “the commissars in Beijing are committed to making China the global hegemon by 2049, with the seizure of Taiwan the urgent next step towards their oft-declared goal”.
Except, when he was PM, Abbott was saying that “China is a very good friend of Australia and it’s a friendship which is getting stronger all the time”, inviting Communist Party figures into parliament, refusing to condemn China’s actions in the South China Sea, and expressing his pride that “Australian coal, iron ore, gas and services exports have helped to drive [China’s] prosperity”. Apart from that, Abbott’s current shock that Donald Trump’s second term as US president is not “more thoughtful and more considered” than his first, after that campaign, is genuinely kind of sweet. —CL

TMFI, CL, but the pond was exceptionally pleased no link was provided, and naturally the pond made no attempt to find one. 

The pond only wondered if this means that the reptiles, at long last, have finally got jack of the preening narcissist, and now the only way the attention seeker can escape his role as Mr Irrelevance is by turning to Substack?

Whatever,  on with the parade of reptiles, still bruised by that parade ...

Was the pond surprised at the lead?

CLIMATE
Business issues $530bn warning on Labor’s 2035 emissions target
Corporate Australia has calculated the eye-watering price tag of a 70 per cent cut, with new targets set to be unveiled within weeks.
By Geoff Chambers

Nah, the pond will only be surprised the day the reptiles feature climate change and climate science, though that's not likely to happen even as Sydney harbour surges at reptile hive mind central in Holt street, Surry Hills.

AUKUS also caused concern ...

‘SHARED SECURITY INTERESTS’
Albanese has ‘warm’ chat with Trump ahead of US visit
The Prime Minister had his fourth phone call with Donald Trump but there was no mention of AUKUS.
By Joe Kelly and Geoff Chambers

No mention of AUKUS? It's still a thing? The pond supposes we must welcome any chance to p*ss money against a wall ...

Comrade Dan and that parade was only third on the list, a bit of a demotion, while over on the far right the reptiles remained climate agitated ...

Now the pond can't look at every reptile, even Geoff chambering an offering clocked by the reptiles at a mere two minutes ...

PM, Bowen take us on a mystery climate tour
The irony of Labor’s ruthless attacks on Peter Dutton’s ‘$600bn nuclear plan’ is that the government has never put clear price tags on its renewables revolution.
Bu Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Anyone wanting an attempt at a reptile delivering irony can trot off to the archive.

That didn't take long, did it?

And now, enoughalready with the dilly-dallying, the endless delaying, waiter, bring on the main course for the day ...

The header: Xi has rewritten the past to change the story the 20th century, This week’s parade distorted the historical record to present the CCP as the primary agent of Japan’s defeat and elevate the significance of the Chinese theatre in determining the war’s outcome.

The caption: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Photo: Alexander Kazakov/Sputnik via AP

Now the pond has far too much rat cunning to fall for our Henry's assault on Chairman Xi. 

Indeed in recent times the pond linked to Michael Schuman in The Atlantic, Life Has Gotten Surreal in China, The state is ever more insistent on a reality at odds with people’s experience. That’s not a good sign for progress.(under a different header in the archive, China is Living a Utopian Lie)

The pond didn't even argue whether life was more surreal in the USA or China at the moment, even when confronted by images right out of Alice ...

So the pond decided to just let our Henry have a good rant, get it out of his system, a little like deploying leeches to feast on the humours ...

Step outside, Bernard Malamud once wrote, and it’s raining history, with the stormy mists of the past blurring the actors’ vision of the present. This week, history didn’t just rain: as Xi Jinping, surrounded by the creme de la creme of the world’s autocrats, feted the 80th anniversary of the “great victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression”, it poured. And the past didn’t just blur visions of the present; it was being used to blind them.
The event itself was a pure product of the Xi era. Until 2015, when a spectacular military parade was held in Beijing, any commemorations of the end of the Pacific War were extremely low-key. Indeed, before the late 1980s the day was scarcely marked, as public celebrations were focused on the Chinese Communist Party’s achievements.

At this point the reptiles produced a splendid snap, featuring pop up identifying tags ...

That seemed to send our Henry right off the deep end ...

In that narrative, China’s past, from the turn of the 19th century through to Mao Zedong’s proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949, was a litany of humiliations. It was only with the CCP’s defeat of the imperialists’ “lackeys” – and first and foremost of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) – that China finally “stood up”.
Seen through that prism, it was the CCP that had, virtually on its own, resisted Japan. The fact that the KMT accounted for 65 per cent of the Chinese combatants and 85 per cent of the casualties was brushed aside, as was the fact that 90 per cent of the Japanese forces were primarily engaged in fighting the KMT.
And brushed aside too was the fact that the KMT was responsible for almost all the Japanese casualties. Instead, the casualties the CCP’s guerrilla warfare had inflicted were inflated by a factor of 10, erasing the KMT’s contribution to halting the Japanese offensive.
That changed somewhat in the 1980s, as the period’s however limited liberalisation permitted greater objectivity in historical research. But as Harvard’s Rana Mitter has brilliantly argued, the vastly enhanced prominence subsequently given to “the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression” was hardly due to a measured reappraisal of the record.
Rather, it was, in part, an attempt to provide emerging generations with a “useable past”, filling the vacuum of the disasters the communists had caused – disasters that had cost tens of millions of lives but could not be frankly discussed and honestly addressed. With those events swept under the carpet, the party’s ideological cupboard was bare; glorifying the war wove a heroic story that could bolster a militant nationalism.

As support, the reptiles rolled in a familiar EXCLUSIVE The Australian's Cameron Stewart breaks down China’s latest military hardware, offering analysis on what the arsenal reveals about the nation’s growing power and global ambitions.

Some will be disappointed at the way that ancient Greeks and Romans seem to have been dropped by our Henry, but please admire the way he avoids mentioning events such as the Nanjing massacre ...

At the same time, in contrast to the humiliation narrative, which portrayed China as a victim, the “great victory” projected assertive strength in an image consistent with Xi’s vision of China’s future. As Xi himself repeatedly stressed, “the Chinese people’s victory in the War of Resistance against Japan was the first complete victory in a recent war where China resisted the invasion of a foreign enemy”, marking a historic change from which there would be no turning back.
Moreover, the victory was not merely righteous in moral terms; it legitimated China’s right to play a major role in shaping and reshaping the international order, while the memory of the horrors Japan’s troops committed entitled China to cast the Japanese (and their American patrons) as unrepentant warmongers whose belligerent instincts had to be held in check. And last but not least, the claim that the Japanese forces’ losses in China were at the heart of Japan’s ultimate defeat stripped the US and its Western allies of the credit for freeing Asia of Japanese imperialism.
All this required further distorting the historical record, both so as to present the CCP as the primary agent of Japan’s defeat and so as to elevate the significance of the Chinese theatre in determining the war’s outcome. At the same time, the feeble attempts made during the brief window of liberalisation to accurately describe the war years had to be scrubbed away.

Naturally there was a snap of the chief villain, Chinese President Xi Jinping toasts on a reception following this week’s military parade. Picture: Vladimir Smirnov/ Sputnik via AP

Our Henry went on to tackle sociopathic Vlad the impaler...

Once Xi denounced “historical nihilism” at a 2013 Politburo session, the stage was set for that scrubbing to occur on a massive scale. Beginning in 2017, the textbooks used in Chinese schools were comprehensively revised, with the new texts unfailingly describing the CCP as the “mainstay” in the war against Japan and heaping scorn on the KMT. As for the very fragmentary references the earlier textbooks made to the crimes of Maoism, they were shortened into insignificance.
And to guard against any deviations, hotlines and online “truth” portals were established in 2021, with citizens being strongly advised to promptly report content that, and individuals who, “falsify” history, while prosecutions for “historical nihilism” were vastly stepped up.
None of those moves would come as any surprise to Vladimir Putin, who proudly flanked Xi at this week’s parade. In effect, with Putin having declared that “Russia’s most valuable resource is its historical memory”, his regime anticipated Xi by replacing the textbooks it had inherited from the Yeltsin years, framing the “Great Patriotic War” as the moment when Russia, alone and largely unaided, once more saved its centuries-old civilisation from aggressors intent on its dismemberment.
The old texts were bad enough; the new ones, in discussing World War II, entirely ignored the devastating harm Stalin’s purges did to the Red Army’s effectiveness, justified the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the USSR’s annexation of the Baltic States, whitewashed the murderous deportations of entire ethic groups, and stayed silent about the tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers condemned to the Gulag merely for having been POWs.

The nihilistic pond wasn't tempted to defend Vlad the sociopath, and must confess it didn't watch the parade, Chinese soldiers march during the parade to mark the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan and the end of World War II. Picture: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

A correspondent in fine form did note that it had impressed weaker reptile minds...

Gushed the Bro, from his war-room recliner
“You’ll never see anything finer
Than the weapons displayed
In that dazzling parade -
That Xinping just bunged on in China!”

What an honour for the Bro, and so to the our Henry wrap up ...

Moreover, further paralleling Xi, Putin’s regime progressively criminalised “falsifying” history, including by inserting in Russia’s 2020 constitution a provision that imposes a duty on the government to apprehend and punish those who in any way cast doubt on the Russian people’s “heroism”. The result is that at least 30 people have recently been imprisoned, often for lengthy periods, simply for asserting obvious historical facts, such as the statement that the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact divided up Eastern Europe”.
Finally, just as Xi has intensified his rhetorical attacks on Japan, so Putin has increasingly assailed what he portrays as a revanchist, remilitarising Germany. Traditionally, the “Great Patriotic War” was always described as a battle against “fascism”. However, particularly since the invasion of Ukraine, the references to “fascism” have virtually disappeared from Putin’s speeches, with the Russian term for Nazism taking its place amid claims that an unrepentant Germany is leading the EU into a renewed assault on the integrity of Mother Russia.
These are, in short, celebrations that shamefully tarnish the glory of the events they pretend to commemorate. As mythologies are invented in the service of tyranny and repression, it is only an unyielding commitment to fact, proof and evidence that can guard knowledge against the forces of deception, shedding light on truths the autocrats would shroud in darkness.
But as we politicise our own history, sacrificing objectivity to politically sanctioned causes and imposing enforced silences, how long can it be before the whole notion of historical truth collapses? And once it goes, what bulwarks protect the past from the obliterators of memory? Yes, it is raining history; but it’s a hard rain that’s falling, and it risks blinding us into a reign of lies.

Hmm, what could our Henry mean, what could he be implying? What is this reign of lies?

As for Comrade Dan, again the pond owes Crikey a debt ...

If anything, the sorry saga reminded the pond of all those mercenary comedians heading over to Saudi Arabia for the looting, a sighting which vexed Marina Hyde and her partner in their YouTube podcast, The Comedians Crazy For Saudi Cash ...

It goes without saying that Killer is the bonus du jour, but first the pond would like to draw attention to another piece in The Atlantic, The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler, A growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the lessons of World War II. (*archive link)

There's something about that feral, tribal, deeply weird far right raging that reminds the pond of the way that WASPishness can turn full neo-Nazi...

And speaking of WASP routines ...

The header: World-beating migration rate is quickly changing our country, We are told diversity makes us stronger, and if that is the case then Australia is ideed about to be become a superpower.

The header for the inspirational snap (please don't write in about the typo, the pond merely observes and reproduces the hive mind product): An anti-immigration rally at Sydney’s Belmore Park last wekend. (Photo: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images.)

Yes, he'd love to go there, waving the flag and raging, but he can't quite go there...

... so  Killer has to walk the fine line between abuse of those bloody Kryptonian aliens ruining the country (apologies for those who haven't seen the latest Superman), in fine neo-Nazi style, and a more refined disparaging of furriners ruining the country, Pauline Hanson style ..

One piece of government-promoted wisdom few of us could ever forget is how diversity is our strength. In other words, the more people of different cultural backgrounds in a nation, the stronger that nation becomes.
A cursory look around the world, and most certainly the historical record, suggest this is an empirically contestable proposition to say the least, yet it can’t be denied Australia has had a remarkable and enviable record at integrating a huge number of people from many different cultures and backgrounds.
That success might yet be tested if the challenges to social cohesion in Europe are anything to go by, where protests against mass immigration have erupted alongside the rise of sometimes unsavoury political parties determined to stop the flow.
ABS figures show that in 25 years the number of Australian residents born in mainly non-English-speaking countries has more than doubled to 6.6 million. Meanwhile, Australia’s native-born population grew by just 27 per cent.
Whatever the impact of such booming diversity on social cohesion, it appears set to be a boon to Labor, potentially locking the Coalition out of office for many years. Labor pollster Kos Samaras, director at RedBridge Group, recently pointed out that “85 per cent of the Indian diaspora voted for the Labor Party at the last election”.
“The figures sit alongside a paradox: socially and culturally conservative (Indian) communities still vote for Labor. They are socially conservative, aspirational, small-business entrepreneurs, and they’re voting for Labor,” he told The Indian Sun, an Australian local newspaper for the Indian community.

The reptiles were shocked, shocked so they say, Shocking scenes have emerged from the August 31st March for Australia protest, which saw clashes between anti-immigration rally attendees, counter-protesters and police, with Claims made that Neo-Nazis infiltrated the protests.

Isn't one of those figures a refugee Kiwi embraced despite his vowel shift accent?

Carry on with the killing...

This year Indian-born residents are expected to exceed a million on the back of accelerating immigration from South Asia since the post Covid reopening, soaring past the UK and New Zealand, which for decades had held the top spots. Indeed, the Indian Sun pointed out that figure excluded more than 300,000 Australians of Indian ancestry born here.

Oops, here the pond should confess a conflict of interest. Just yesterday the pond had a meeting with a nice Indian-born doctor, to discuss a surgery performed by an expert Vietnamese-born surgeon. 

Sure, when the pond joked he was a gun surgeon, the doctor didn't have the first clue about life in Australian shearing sheds, but all the same, the only reason the pond is still running is thanks to a health system that seems to run on migrant inputs ...

So it goes, and so back to the killing fields...

The rapidity of the change has been striking. According to ABS data, in 2000, India wasn’t even in the top 10 migrant populations by country of birth. Now it is top, ahead of Nepal, Malaysia, South Africa and Sri Lanka which have edged out Italy, Scotland, Greece, Germany and the Netherlands.
It’s no secret Labor has been much more successful winning the votes of new Australians. Just this week this masthead revealed that Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan planned a five-day trip to China in what was reported as a “major political play to consolidate support among Chinese-Australian voters heading into the 2026 Victorian election”.
She will take along four backbenchers and a junior minister who represent critical marginal seats with large numbers of Chinese-Australian voters. In federal and state elections where sometimes as few as 10,000 votes can change the outcome, Indian-Australian and Chinese-Australians’ political views matter greatly.
It’s not fanciful to think the Coalition might need some high-profile trips to India and China too if it is to have any success in upcoming elections.

At this point the reptiles interrupted again... Australia’s permanent migration figures will remain at 185,000 over the 2025-26 financial year, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has confirmed. The figures were released on Tuesday after tens of thousands of protesters stormed Australia’s capital cities demanding migration be lowered in order to put less pressure on housing and amenities. Unlike overseas net migration, which accounts for visitors who remain in Australia for more than 12 months in a 16-month period, permanent migration includes the number of skilled, family and humanitarian visas authorised by the government. Mr Burke said the steady 185,000 figure would allow Australia to control migration growth. “It follows consultation with the states and territories, which recommended maintaining the size and composition of the program, with a focus on skilled migration,” he said. “The Department of Home Affairs has been processing visas based on last year’s level, so there has been no disruption to the delivery of the program.”

(For those wondering why that sinister oriental figure was presented in an alarming red circle, relax, it's just Jessica Wang, Newscorp federal politics reporter, presenting as Newswire Senior Political Reporter. Eek, et tu reptiles? How soon before she replaces Killer of the IPA? Eek, they're taking over, the relentless hordes are everywhere).

Panic attack subsiding, it's back to Killer of the IPA, suffused with fear, and always up for a mongering for his fine "old-fashioned" thoughts... (how he yearns for the good old days of the White Australia policy) ...

Indeed, according to India’s Commerce and Industry Minister, Piyush Goyal, in remarks reported by The Economic Times of India this month, the Indian government was in “deep negotiations with Australia” to send “hundreds of thousands” of skilled Indian tradesmen to Australia help the government achieve its 2029 home-building target.
It must be stressed that the bulk of new immigrants cannot vote in Australian elections. They must first have been a permanent resident for at least a year, and lived in the country for at least four years in total. But it’s possible many will stay and seek citizenship.
Politicians from both major parties accused Australians who last weekend marched against mass immigration of stoking division, but it may be the deliberate policy of mass immigration is what is stoking division. One would struggle to find any country in history where a sudden, massive influx of immigrants hasn’t elicited disquiet, especially after a few years of high inflation.
Indeed, the UK, which voted for less immigration from Europe in 2016, has for two years seen a surge of anti-immigration riots, after more than four million arrivals, almost entirely from outside Europe, arrived from 2021.
Some proponents of massive immigration here deny it’s happening. In The Age this week, ANU Professor Alan Gamlen said the Institute of Public Affairs’ claim that net permanent and long-term arrivals exceeded 457,000 over the 12 months to June included tourism. It clearly does not. He also said the figure would be “more than 30 per cent” lower, even though the official Net Overseas Migration figure for that period is months away from publication and has traditionally closely tracked the NPLTA figure.
Call me old-fashioned, but even were Gamlen right, that’s still about triple the annual level of net migration of the Hawke-Keating years.
Australia has entered a period of extraordinary population growth — by far the highest in the developed world – and demographic and cultural change, with profound political and economic consequences. Who can blame immigrants for wanting to come here, and for wanting to maintain economic and cultural ties with their homeland? We would do the same were the situation reversed.
Let’s cross our fingers and hope Australia doesn’t encounter problems with which Europe is dealing.
Indeed, if more diversity makes us strong, Australia is about to be become a superpower.

 What an excellent example of both siderism, with tints of darkness, blackness and a cloud of doom.

That said, please forgive the pond if it prefers its medical advice coming from anyone but Robert Kennedy and Killer of the IPA.

And so to wrap up the day's proceedings with the infallible Pope for the day, exploring a world not covered by the hive mind...