In which the pond moves from King Donald and the deeply weird to a deeply dull and predictable Killer outing ...

 

The pond deeply regrets that the bromancer failed the pond's "foreign editor" test, though perhaps a weekend offering will emerge later in the day ...

What a chance to celebrate King Donald and Pete was lost by the bro...

Each day the bromancer stays silent as King Donald achieves astonishing new levels of diplomacy...

Trump Secretly Admits He Has Started a New War

At least two of the boats struck last month came from Venezuela (even though the surge of overdose deaths in recent years has been driven by fentanyl from Mexico) but very little proof of who or what was on board has been provided.
Experts have also questioned why U.S. forces would launch a missile if they could simply stop the boat and arrest the crew, which is usual maritime practice.
And at the United Nations General Assembly last week, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said Trump’s actions were akin to “murder” and called for him to be criminally investigated.

In that spirit, scores of world leaders have admired him while the bro stays silent...

World Leaders Share a Laugh at Trump, 79, for Ending Nonexistent War

A group of world leaders openly laughed at Donald Trump over his boasts about ending a conflict between two countries that were never at war.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama joked with French President Emmanuel Macron about the 79-year-old Trump’s repeated gaffes, in which he claims to have resolved a war between Azerbaijan and Albania, when he actually means the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
“You should make an apology to us,” Rama told Macron while standing next to Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, in a moment recorded by Azerbaijani outlet News.AZ. “Because you didn’t congratulate us for the peace deal that President Trump made between Albania and Azerbaijan.”

And again ...

Trump, who is on course to be the oldest sitting president in U.S. history, went one step further during the American Cornerstone Institute’s Founders’ Dinner in September, when he suggested he ended a conflict between Armenia and Cambodia—two countries more than 4,000 miles apart that have never been at war with each other.
“Cambodia and Armenia,” the 79-year-old said in a typically rambling speech. “It was just starting, and it was a bad one. Think of that.”

Moving along, the pond's atheist logarithms were awitter and atitter with the news that atheists had been deemed likely terrorists by King Donald ...

It's one of those mindless bits of grab-all-isms ....

...Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

The cure for the disease?

The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.  Through this comprehensive strategy, law enforcement will disband and uproot networks, entities, and organizations that promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society.

Sounds like the real disease, rampant fascism, needs a cure, but perhaps it'd not be wise to mention being an atheist in the new disunited states:

Oh and the shutdown continues apace with useless polls all the go ... We asked 1,000 Americans who they blame for the shutdown

Enough of the comedy already ...

As it so happens, the pond much preferred to reference Laura Bullard's The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession, Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since. (*archive link if you must)

Every so often Wired comes up with a ripper read, though it might be only of specialist interest - the pond's partner found it very tough going and at the end could only mutter "deeply, deeply weird".

But it had the lot, from the apocalypse to bonkers billionaire hawk tuah hawker of doom Peter Thiel, to his hapless puppet couch-molester JD to Girard, Palaver, Schmitt, Nazis, mimetics, and barking mad Catholic fundamentalism.

The pond won't dive in at length.

Instead here's just the first two pars as a teaser trailer ...

Peter Thiel’s Armageddon speaking tour has—like the world—not ended yet. For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers. He has chatted onstage with the economist podcaster Tyler Cowen about the katechon (the scriptural term for “that which withholds” the end times); traded some very awkward on-camera silences with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; and is, at this very moment, in the midst of delivering a four-part, off-the-record lecture series about the Antichrist in San Francisco.
Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world—in politics, technology, and the fate of the species. And to really grasp Thiel’s katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major lecture of his doomsday road show—which took place on an unusually hot day in Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it, but I’ve been able to reconstruct it by talking to people who were there.

Oh and before setting out, you'll need this glossary...

Deeply, deeply weird ...

Call the pond fascinated, while suitably inclined to hilarity and deep suffering, and consider it a warm-up to Killer Creighton, relegated to a late arvo appearance, as much for dullness and predictability as for needing the space for Our Henry ...

Killer is astonishing expert at economics, as recently celebrated in the pond ...

Want to know more?

Jim Chalmers should ignore the ‘gurus’ and look to Argentina for economic tips

Of course Killer's not the only clown in the karnival of kircus klowns ...

Sen. Mike Lee has railed against spending on foreign aid. With a $20B bailout for Argentina on deck, he's not saying a word.

Sen. Mike Lee once called Argentina’s Javier Milei the first politician he’d “idolized.” Now, as the Trump administration reportedly prepares a $20 billion bailout to prop up Milei’s government ahead of U.S. midterms, the Utah Republican—long a foe of foreign aid—has gone quiet.
Will Lee’s anti-foreign aid absolutism survive when it’s a foreign leader he champions?
Since he became president of Argentina in 2023, Lee has lavished praise on Javier Milei and his libertarian economic proposals to shrink the state and deregulate the economy. He's urged the United States to follow suit. Now, with Washington weighing tens of billions of dollars to rescue Milei, Lee doesn't have much to say.
Milei was propelled to victory due to widespread voter dissatisfaction with the country’s economic crisis and persistent poverty. Inflation skyrocketed to more than 140% in 2023. He promised to enact a sweeping overhaul of the economy plus enormous cuts to government spending. Supporters dubbed his policies “chainsaw economics” due to his penchant for brandishing a chainsaw during the campaign.
Lee was immediately smitten, applauding Milei’s fiscal austerity and deregulation push.
In January 2024, Lee posted on social media that Milei was the first politician he’s idolized, and that the U.S. should follow Argentina’s lead.

Sad to say, after all that, Killer's outing this day was very disappointing, a strictly by the numbers bashing of furriners, part of the seemingly endless ongoing murmuration of the hive mind on this matter...

The header: Residency the bait as universities cash in on foreign students, You might’ve wondered why Uber-driving foreign graduates have forked out so much money for Australian degrees. It has little to do with academic ambition or a thirst for learning.

The caption for the meaningless snap, illustrating only the emptiness of the lizard Oz graphics department: The back blocks of an Australian university campus. ‘More than 50 per cent of international graduates working in Australia are employed well below their skill level and many are working outside the field of their qualification,’ a report says. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Diego Fedele

Killer was right on to the invading hordes ...

If you’ve ever had the awkward experience of being driven around in an Uber by a South Asian with a PhD or masters degree, you might’ve wondered why these hardworking foreign graduates had forked out tens of thousands of dollars a year for their degrees.
The answer has little to do with academic ambition or a thirst for learning. It’s for the right to work, ideally permanently, in Australia – which, even in relatively low-skilled jobs, delivers a better living standard than professional jobs available in their home countries.
Australia’s higher education sector has a real shot at a medal in the ticket-clipping Olympics, siphoning off tens of billions of dollars in revenue from foreign students who, in truth, would never pay the fees charged were it not for the right to work and the possibility of residency.
A new report by Jobs and Skills Australia, published in August, perhaps unintentionally bells the cat on this racket. “More than 50 per cent of international graduates working in Australia are employed well below their skill level and many are working outside the field of their qualification,” the report found. One anonymous engineering employer, who had recently hired a foreign student, candidly told the department: “A lot of his (student) mates just come here to earn the money, drive the Uber.”
The report also made plain that migration – not education – drives enrolments. “Nearly 70 per cent of international higher education students reported that the possibility to migrate was a reason for choosing to study in Australia, rising to 77 per cent of Indian and 79 per cent of Nepali higher education students.” For these cohorts, the degree is merely the ticket (an expensive one) to live and work in a rich country.
Yet for all the hype, the economic return for these students is dismal. International graduates in business and management, the most popular areas of study, were earning just $57,000 a year in 2022 compared to $115,000 for equivalently qualified domestic students.
In engineering and computing, foreign graduates were earning $40,000 a year less than locals. It’s a startling gap. They are, in effect, a source of cheap (yet highly educated) low-skilled labour, holding down wages in food, accommodation, retail, ride-sharing and point-to-point delivery sectors.
“Over 90 per cent of Indian and nearly 96 per cent of Nepali higher education students cited the ability to work while studying as one of the reasons they chose Australia,” the report noted. Consider the US comparison. There, foreign students are effectively barred from low-skilled jobs. They can work only on campus during their studies, for no more than 20 hours a week, and do not have automatic access to post-study work rights. Australia, by contrast, hands out the Temporary Graduate visa almost as a matter of course.
Our universities and vocational colleges have been milking this discrepancy royally: enrolments surged to 787,000 in 2023, up from just over 410,000 a decade earlier. The US, with 13 times Australia’s population, had just 1.1 million international students in 2024.
The motives are even more plain in the vocational sector. It is telling that the average age of foreign students enrolled in VET courses – the ones that require little preparation – is three years older than that of international university students. These courses in cookery, business and marketing are less about education than immigration pathways.

The pond didn't feel the need to interrupt, but as an aside, in a recent visit to the RPA, noted that the hospital, and quite possibly the entire NSW health system would collapse without the presence of migrants, offered a singularly diverse and useful population of health carers.

The pond was extraordinarily grateful for their attention and care.

Naturally Killer didn't care about any of this, and turned to blaming invading cuckoos for the housing crisis, with the reptiles dragging in Ming the Merciless acolytes, Menzies Research Centre Chief Economist Nico Louw says the government has fallen short on making significant changes to migration policies that would help address the housing crisis. “It seems that most of our vice chancellors, particularly at the elite universities, seem to think that their job is to run an export business to bring in international students,” Mr Louw said. “It's impossible to have a realistic debate about it in this country. “Every time you say anything to do with international students, the Vice Chancellors act as though it’s the end of the world and the universities are all going to fall over.”

It was all drearily predictable and familiar, roughly akin to King Donald's war on migrants ...

“Graduates’ persistence means they have become an important feeder group to Australia’s permanent migration program,” the Jobs and Skills report noted, pointing out that 40 per cent of international students who began courses in the early 2010s had become permanent residents within a decade. Many had to churn through “five or six different visas before being granted permanent residence”.
All this is expensive, time-consuming and degrading for the foreign students themselves. They have become so numerous they often struggle to socialise with native Australians at all. Even the English proficiency, once a selling point of Australian education, is now being undermined by sheer numbers.
It’s not clear that the system helps their home countries much either. Nations such as India and Nepal are effectively deprived of bright young people so they can deliver food to Sydney and Melbourne’s middle and upper classes.

The paranoid fear of furriners continued apace in the next clip, with faint echoes of Faragism on the front palate and Geert Wilders on the back... Microbusiness Chief Economist Leith Van Onselen discusses an influx of international students at Australian universities. At the University of Sydney last year, international students outnumbered domestic enrolments for the first time in its 170-year history, raising questions about who higher education really serves. “Australia has the highest concentration of international students in the world … behind Luxembourg,” Mr Van Onselen told Sky News host Danica De Giorgio. “Jobs and Skills Australia released a report this week, and it basically admitted that international students mostly come to Australia for work and permanent residence. “They basically admitted that the whole international education system is basically one big migration scam.”

What's the chance of seeing a gown in university grounds outside of graduation day? 

Never mind, it's just a visual cliché, designed to match the stereotyping and the paranoia ...

If we are going to persist with this charade, we should at least be more honest and efficient about it. One obvious solution would be to establish a new visa – call it the Cheap Foreign Workers Subclass 650 – with a much higher application fee, and cut out the higher education sector entirely. This would allow our universities, where foreign students now make up close to half of all enrolments, to shrink back to their core, original purpose: educating Australians.
The institutions would howl, of course, because they have become addicted to the billions from international fees. They constantly boast that foreign students generate a $51bn “export industry”. But this is highly misleading. For a start, the estimated $US9bn ($13.6bn) in cash remittances sent home every year should be deducted. This headline number also conflates tuition fees with spending on rent and groceries.
In fact, the size of this supposedly “fourth-largest export industry” is more akin to what the federal government could collect directly if it charged these hardworking young foreigners for the right to live and work in Australia. At least then taxpayers would be getting something back, which governments could spend on infrastructure for all rather than new university buildings and armies of overpaid university bureaucrats.
The costs and benefits would be clear. Right now, the universities are clipping the ticket, the students are driving Ubers, and the public is told it’s all an “export miracle”. It is nothing of the sort.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

The pond regrets the nose dive this post took - from high hilarity to the deeply weird to a standard bashing of furriners, an aged and worn bit of migrant panic, fear and loathing, straight out of the hive mind fear mongering playbook ...

But the pond is something of a completist, and does its best to help other completists in their completism, even if you occasionally get a dud, useless stamp in the reptile album.

You can still tick it off, and say it's been another Killer day for the karnival of klowns ...

And the cartoon for this outing is the immortal Rowe, celebrating a vaguely related theme ...