In which the pond leaves the work to correspondents, before indulging in the bromancer and the WSJ ...

 

Each day the pond is trapped in the hive mind the comedy deficit is getting bigger and bigger.

Take The Bulwark's Discouraged? Yes. Despairing? No.

The post thoughtfully linked to King Donald's latest court action ... (pdf)

There, amongst many other richly humorous offerings, the pond did indeed find details of the absurd $15 billion suit, Trump Makes Good on Threat to New York Times With $15B Lawsuit, which if the NY Times adopted an ABC comedy approach, and Played Hard, would lead to much legal jeopardy by way of depositions and discovery, not least ...

55. Currently, President Trump and the Trump Organization own and operate the magnificent Trump Tower, Trump International Hotel and Tower, The Trump Building, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, Trump Park Avenue, Trump Parc, Trump Parc East, Trump World Tower, 610 Park Avenue, Trump Tower City Center, Trump Palace, Trump Park Residences Yorktown, Trump Plaza, 200 Riverside Boulevard, 220 Riverside Boulevard, 240 Riverside Boulevard, 1 Central Park West, the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and 40 Wall Street, in addition to numerous other iconic properties. 

It's all written for an audience of one, and yet out of the mouths of these lawyer babes and rubes, it boldly says he does actually own and operate ...

And yet ... 

King Donald tried to refute his own legal action ...

Washington-based journalist John Lyons had asked the US president several questions about his business dealings, including: "Is it appropriate, President Trump, that a president in office should be engaged in so much business activity?"
"Well, I'm really not," Mr Trump said. "My kids are running the business. You know what the activity — where are you from?"
When Lyons told Mr Trump he was from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Mr Trump replied: "Oh, the Australian — you're hurting Australia.
"In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now, and they want to get along with me.

His kids operate the businesses?

Indeed, indeed ...

And to rub salt into the defamation news, the grey lady bounced back with ...

Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches.
A lucrative transaction involving the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm and an agreement giving the Emiratis access to A.I. chips were connected in ways that have not been previously reported.

A sample:

They really made a meal of it ...

5 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into 2 Giant Deals Involving Trump
A $2 billion crypto deal and an agreement to sell valuable chips to the United Arab Emirates were intertwined in ways that have not been previously reported.

But wait, there's more high comedy, in relation to political violence and free speech ...

Bondi’s DOJ Censors Study Showing Who Commits Political Violence
NOTHING TO SEE HERE
The 2024 study is no longer accessible on the DOJ website.

So many jokes, so little time...

Every day there's fresh high comedy in King Donald's monarchy - the comedy above is already stale, fresh jokes are being minted by the hour - and yet very little of it filters into the lizard Oz hive mind.

Instead you cop this on a Thursday ...

There you go ...

King Donald consorting with his own kind, the UK Royals, and the reptiles were duly alarmed by a MIA moment ...

Donald Trump state visit: King trumpets AUKUS as Keir Starmer left out of royal procession for state banquet, The British Prime Minister attended the banquet held in honour of Donald Trump, but his absence from the royal procession has not been explained.

The real mystery would have been why Starmer set himself up for a ritual humiliation, what with him currently dodging humiliations most days of the week ...

All that was worth was as a segue to a Rowe cartoon ...

Worse, Thursday is always dire, what with petulant Peta on parade over on the extreme far right, and (briefly) top of the bigoted reptile world ma ...

The pond feels justified in handing over reading assignments to correspondents to make what they will of this wretched assortment of reptiles, not a decent lolly in sight ...

Even Egypt’s President chided fellow Muslims
Aftab Malik’s report takes the standard path of blaming Australia and Australians for any negative attitudes to Islam.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

So the reptiles did eventually note the report, only to indulge in whining self-pity and more bigotry, as an alternative header made clear ... As usual it is Australians who are being blamed for attitudes to Islam

Jack the Insider was also present, offering Now, remember this - we should never fear to act on dementia

Confront those creepy-crawly fears of dementia
‘My mother took her teaching skills down the dark corridors of dementia and would read from the captions beneath TV shows.’
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Ted was on hand to help with the climate science denialism ...Kurri Kurri gas-diesel power station is a lesson in lazy power

$2bn Kurri Kurri station switcheroo a lesson in lazy power
Angus Taylor said the Opposition’s plan was “economicallyincoherent”, (sic) aimed at shoring up support in local Labor-held seats.
By Ted Woodley

Ted seems to have added to his CV ...

Ted Woodley is a former managing director of PowerNet, GasNet, EnergyAustralia and China Light & Power Systems (Hong Kong).

There was another helpful outing ...

2035 TARGET
Circa 60 per cent: business’s cautious carbon target olive branch
Business leaders are expected to cautiously back a 2035 emissions reduction target if it has a lower range of about 60 per cent, ahead of its release on Thursday.
Greg Brown and Matthew Cranston

And a little later in the day there was a sensationalist shock horror that jumped to the top of the digital edition ...

Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC abandons $30bn Santos takeover bid
Abu Dhabi has sensationally ended its stalking of South Australian oil and gas producer Santos in a bombshell decision just days ahead of a deadline to make a formal offer. 

Golding could have done it all with a couple of 'toons ...

Meanwhile, Ben was still packing it...

FLAT-PACT DILEMMA
PNG to consult Beijing on Canberra defence treaty
By Ben Packham

And that sent the bromancer into a tizz, and perforce the pond had to follow ... because it turns out that the best way to deal with the Gaza genocide is to ignore it, stick head in sand, mythical ostrich style, or retreat into shell, Mitch tortoise method ...

The header: It’s time to prioritise the Pacific rather than Palestine, PM, The refusal so far of the Papua New Guinea cabinet to endorse the military alliance treaty is a serious setback for Australia and a big win for Beijing.

The caption: Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister James Marape with Anthony Albanese at flag-raising ceremony marking the country's 50th independence anniversary in Port Moresby on Tuesday. Picture: Department of Prime Minister, PNG

It was just a three minute read, so the reptiles said, though the bromancer was seriously disconcerted ...

If the Albanese government would spend less time on Palestine and more time on the Pacific, it might avoid serial humiliations like its failure to land long-announced security agreements first with Vanuatu, and now, much more seriously, with Papua New Guinea.
The refusal of the PNG cabinet to endorse the military alliance treaty Canberra had negotiated with Port Moresby is another Albanese government failure in the Pacific, a serious setback for Australia and a big win for Beijing.
Albanese says the treaty will be signed within a couple of weeks. Well, who knows? His government’s Pacific policy resembles its defence policy – lots of self-congratulatory announcements of things that don’t end up happening.
The failure in Port Moresby is an indictment of Australia’s poor practice and poor policy in the Pacific. What was our high commission doing?
This is meant to be our area of core expertise and core influence.
In the next week or two Albanese will make high-blown speeches about Palestine and climate change. The difference ­between Palestine and climate change on one hand and PNG on the other is that nothing of consequence will be affected by whatever silly attitudes Australia takes on the former, but our policy on PNG matters like hell.
All of the mostly fraudulent ­increase in defence spending ­announced this week, and the military treaty signing with PNG – which didn’t happen – is meant to influence Albanese’s upcoming meeting with Donald Trump. The US President said this meeting would take place in an absurd over-reaction to perfectly legitimate questions asked by the ABC’s John Lyons.

Ah, a glancing mention of King Donald, as the reptiles slipped in an AV distraction featuring Ben, still packing it, in an EXPLAINER, Foreign affairs and defence correspondent Ben Packham talks to Claire Harvey from Port Moresby on The PM's PNG defence treaty failure

The bromancer's war with China might yet be on by Xmas ...

Albanese is trying to create a sense of martial purpose and strategic effectiveness before he meets Trump. The string of failures in the Pacific doesn’t bolster that image.
Former US deputy secretary of state, Kurt Campbell, told the National Press Club this week that China would seek to sabotage all Australia’s initiatives in the ­Pacific, especially those like the defence treaty with PNG.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape says Beijing had no role in the failure by his cabinet to endorse the treaty. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?
It looks like an initiative that has been mishandled all along the line by Canberra. Why try to slip this in like a sideshow entertainment at the independence anniversary celebrations?
A full-blown mutual military alliance is a huge thing in the life of any nation.
It’s a big deal for Australia as well as PNG. Albanese should have made a dedicated, bilateral visit for this treaty, as he surely would have done had Canberra negotiated such a treaty with any developed nation.
It may also be that the Australian insistence on keeping the contents of the treaty secret until the last minute, part of Canberra’s increasing hostility to transparency and openness, backfired badly.
The two governments failed to socialise the mutual defence treaty provisions among senior PNG military, strategic and political figures. There’s heavy irony in all this. Mutual defence arrangements between Australia and PNG used to be for the benefit of PNG in the event of troubles over the border with Indonesia. That border has been secure for decades. The military threat now, not made explicit but characterising every word of this agreement, is from China.

The bromancer needed shoring up, so the reptiles slipped in good old Shoe having a goss with the dog botherer, Strategic Analysis Australia Michael Shoebridge says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s delayed defence treaty in Papua New Guinea consists of “smacks of carelessness”. “Who advised him to sign a big new defence treaty with Papua New Guinea on the 50th anniversary on Papua New Guinea declaring independence from Australia?” Mr Shoebridge told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “If ever there was a time for sovereignty sensitivity to be peaking in PNG, it’s right when they’re looking back 50 years ago to when we ran the place?”

The bromancer seemed to think King Donald's minions were capable of thought ...

The proposed treaty is pitched as strongly as the wording of the ANZUS alliance, a little below a formal NATO security guarantee but an agreement that each nation would help the other in conflict.
How could this be operationalised? There are two ways. If ­Australia, with the US, were ­involved in conflict with China the Australian Defence Force would want to operate through PNG ­territory just as US forces now ­operate from and through Australian territory.
The Americans no doubt have similar thoughts of their own.

All the pond could think was impure thoughts and devious links, Trump Adviser Demands Elon Musk Ban Anonymous Users From ‘Cesspool’ Social Network

MAGA Melts Down at ‘Moron’ Bondi Over ‘Hate Speech’ Crackdown Threat

Sorry for doing a Tootle, and wandering off the tracks, because at that point the reptiles slipped in a snap to gladden a warrior's heart, On PNG’s Manus Island, members of the Australian Army, Papua New Guinea Defence Force, British Army, US Marines and Manus Island community pose for a group shot with a newly renovated classroom. Picture: supplied

The bromancer then quickly wrapped up proceedings ...

Some in PNG are thinking: so what might this alliance let us in for? The small military facility Australia has built on Manus Island could easily be expanded and is effectively the back door to American forces in Guam, which would certainly be subject to severe attack by Beijing’s forces in the event of hostilities.
This important mutual defence treaty should have been subject to much wider discussion and socialisation in both PNG and Australia.
Instead, following the government’s playbook, it developed in secret, was announced in great fanfare and so far has failed to land.
This has been a messy process. If it is signed and ratified in the next few weeks, it will be a big step forward. But at this stage, let’s hold the champagne.

Hold the champagne? But won't Hegseth be shattered?

And so to the bonus, and the pond can't help that it's the reptiles being lazy and importing the WSJ ...

The header: Look out! Last week saw seven days that shook the world order, Drones over Poland were just the start - foreign foes are capitalising on the their opportunities while most Western leaders are flailing.

The caption for the flag-waving: Demonstrators take part in the Tommy Robinson-led Unite the Kingdom march and rally near Westminster Picture: AP

The reptiles clocked the WRM outing at a humble three minute read ...

A line widely but wrongly attributed to Vladimir Lenin states that there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen. Last week was one of those weeks.

Oh dear, did he have to let that hare loose? Immediately the pond did a Tootle...Quote Origin ...

It seems there's nothing new under the sun, and variations on the saying started early ...

A biblical precursor mentioning the compression and decompression of time appeared in the second epistle of St. Peter. 

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. (New International Version)

They couldn't even stay loyal to the errant KJV?

Never mind, back on the tracks, but sssh, don't call it a genocide ...

Israel struck Hamas negotiators in Qatar and, despite an intensifying global outcry, moved towards a full-scale invasion and occupation of Gaza City.
Amid a wave of cyber attacks and sabotage against European countries, a large group of Russian drones invaded the airspace of Poland, a NATO member.
US President Donald Trump demanded that NATO allies slap massive secondary sanctions on India and China as the first step in a renewed campaign to force Russia to end its attack on Ukraine.
The French government fell after losing a confidence vote in the National Assembly, and Japan’s prime minister announced he was stepping down after a disastrous tenure in which the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party of Japan lost its majorities in both houses of parliament.
“Far right” parties continued their advances across Europe. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly the National Front) and Alice Weidel’s Alternative for Germany, known as AfD, all are leading national polls.
The AfD tripled its vote in the prosperous former West German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, while the streets of London filled with anti-establishment and pro-Trump demonstrators.

The reptiles interrupted this litany with a snap, Co-Leaders of the far right AFD fraction Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla attend debates at the Bundestag in Berlin Picture: Getty Images

WRM continued with the litany ...

Only the intervention of South Korea’s Foreign Minister prevented 316 Hyundai workers from being handcuffed on the long deportation flight from Atlanta to Seoul. Brazil’s former president was sentenced to 27 years in prison after being convicted of plotting a coup. Britain’s ambassador to the US was dismissed after the publication of embarrassing emails he sent to his former friend Jeffrey Epstein.
And the assassination of Charlie Kirk sharpened questions in America and elsewhere about the social and political stability of the US, the country on which what remains of world order depends more than ever.
Any one of these events would dominate a week’s news in calmer times. What we are seeing today is the accelerating dissolution of the post-1945 world order. It isn’t merely that the old order’s foreign opponents have combined more effectively to disrupt it. The order’s defenders are flailing.

Still no mention of emeritus chairman Rupert's role in maintaining King Donald's new world? Never mind, have a pitiful uncredited collage, The assassination of Charlie Kirk highlighted schisms in American society Picture: Getty Images

Now to put a gloss on Kirk ...

There are many reasons for the West’s poor performance. The present tranche of leaders for the most part can neither defend their countries from foreign foes nor defend the political status quo from populists at home. The muddled thinking of a generation of policy elites, who foolishly supposed that geopolitical conflict had ended forever, left the West radically unprepared for resurgent opponents.
Voters everywhere remain unwilling to support vigorous defence and foreign policies that offer hope of reversing the global drift towards great-power conflict. Universities no longer provide the grounding in intellectual, cultural, diplomatic and military history that enables leaders to plan wisely and inspires them to lead well.
As the old order fades, its boundaries become fuzzy and its foes respect them less. That is happening in Europe, where Russia daily tests its belief that the trans-Atlantic alliance is more of a bluff than a real and living force. It is what is happening in the western Pacific, where China probes the defences of its maritime neighbours with increasing confidence and aggression.
In this context, if the Kirk assassination exacerbates American polarisation, the consequences will be global. America’s brutal political competition heightens the chance that the promises of one president will be repudiated by his successor.
It also increases the likelihood that an America consumed by internal divisions will have fewer resources and less energy to devote to foreign policy – no matter who is president.
The news isn’t all bad. While controversial in many quarters, Kirk’s example of patriotism, religious faith and commitment to open dialogue inspired young people all over the country. 

Hang on, hang on, just because he was assassinated, that assassination shouldn't hide his life as a bigoted sh*t stirrer. 

C.f .Moira Donegan, in the Graudian, Charlie Kirk's killing was a tragedy. But we must not rewrite his life...

...In the days following Kirk’s death, several bewilderingly inaccurate postmortem hagiographies have appeared, including from prominent voices on the left and center, that seem to wish that the tragedy of Kirk’s death could retroactively have given him a more honorable life.

The most egregious of these came from Ezra Klein, a center-left columnist at the New York Times known for his ability to channel and influence elite opinion. In a piece published the morning after Kirk’s death, titled Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way, Klein made a series of strained, bizarre and outright untrue assertions about Kirk’s career and character. Kirk, Klein argued, was, if anything, an example of civic virtue. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” Klein said. “He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.” Klein’s point was that political persuasion – the rational debate of ideas between equals in which violence is unthinkable and good faith is presumed – is a cornerstone of liberal democracy, the kind of thing we should all be striving for, the kind of thing we need more of. “American politics has sides,” Klein continued. “There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project – we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment.”

Fair enough, I suppose, on its merits, but such a description of reasoned, honest, good-faith debate is so inaccurate a description of what Charlie Kirk engaged in on college campuses – in his series of large, staged events where he “debated” untrained liberal undergraduates with cameras rolling – that it reads as willfully naive, if not outright dishonest. Charlie Kirk’s “debates” were aggressive, unequal, trolling affairs, in which he sought to provoke his interlocutors to distress, shouted them down and belittled them, spewed hateful rhetoric about queer and trans people, women, Black people, immigrants and Muslims, and selectively edited the ensuing footage to create maximally viral content in which his fans could witness him humiliating the liberals and leftists they perceived to be their enemies. This was not “debate”; it was not reasoned, good-faith discourse; it was not the kind of fair deliberation that democracy relies on. It was a mockery of those things.

If reasoned debate is a precondition of a liberal democracy, there are other preconditions as well. A state cannot be called democratic if it does not offer equal protection of the law – if not all of its citizens are awarded the same dignity by their government and the same vote, same rights of expression and same prerogatives before courts and elected officials in their attempts to influence its policies and navigate its laws. Civic equality – not just civil engagement – is central to the American experiment, too. It is not to excuse his murder to be honest that Kirk opposed that equality. Some historians and political scientists have argued that the United States did not become a democracy until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the laws that intended to end de jure segregation and racist voter suppression. But Kirk opposed the Civil Rights Act, calling it a “huge mistake”. He endorsed the racist so-called “great replacement theory”, in which nefarious actors (usually cast as Jewish people) are seeking to “replace” America’s white population with immigrants, saying it was “well under way every day at our southern border”. On his podcast, he hosted a “slavery apologist” and a man who said that after women “got, you know, the right to vote – after that, it all went downhill”. Kirk himself once said that Black women – he named Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson – “do not have the brain power to be taken seriously”. He condemned Democrats for supposedly wanting to make the US “less white”, and claimed: “There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution.” (It is.) And yet Ezra Klein praised Kirk’s “moxie”. One wonders what such a euphemism is meant to obscure.

In the rush to canonize Kirk and revise his history, honest accountings of his life have not only become rare – they have also become dangerous. In the days since his death, journalists, media personalities and others who have not been sufficiently laudatory to Kirk in public have lost their jobs for telling the truth about his life. Matthew Dowd, a Republican political consultant, was fired from MSNBC after saying that Kirk had spoken “hateful words”. In Phoenix, a sports writer was fired for criticizing euphemistic accounts of Kirk’s beliefs. “‘Political differences’ are not the same thing as spewing hateful rhetoric on a daily basis,” he wrote in a social media post. Many of those eulogizing Kirk want to paint him as a champion of free speech, as a man who peddled in honest inquiry, uninhibited expression and the open exchange of ideas. This is a laughably inaccurate picture of the man’s work; it is in these punishments of those who oppose him that we can see a truer reflection of Kirk’s values.

Well yes, and so on and so forth, while WRM sent the pond off the tracks again with another folly ...

America's capacity for economic and technological innovation is, if anything, renewing itself. 

Your government just made a deal to send chips to the middle east, no doubt so they could be shipped on to China, and you have Robert Kennedy setting the pace for neo-luddism? Former CDC head says she was fired for refusing Kennedy's vaccine changes.

If being unprepared for a new plague is technological innovation, count the pond out. 

What else ya got?

The absurdities and excesses of identity politics have led to such intellectual follies, anti-Semitism and other forms of hate, that even many strongly liberal intellectuals are reconsidering some long-held assumptions. And rising foreign threats are slowly but surely concentrating minds on the need to shore up our defences.

Oh right, sorry, the pond forgot, we need to do an ostrich on the Gaza genocide, and perhaps instead indulge in some extrajudicial killings on international waters ...

And these are the green shoots?

Time will tell whether the green shoots of revival can renew the West and newly empowered populists will grow into their new responsibilities quickly enough to avoid disaster. For now, the upholders of the existing world order lack the conviction and clarity of vision required to defend it. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and even the shell-shocked mullahs of Iran will seek to capitalise on their historic opportunity. There is no reason to suppose these powers will lose interest in probing the West for weaknesses anytime soon.

That source again?

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Somebody sue the wretches for a cool ten billion, while the pond wraps up proceedings with a Wilcox being alarmed by a truly Sydney tragedy..