In which, with the bromancer going MIA, the pond gets Krugmanned ...

 

The pond gave the bromancer every chance to show his stuff as "foreign editor" and offer insights into the performance of King Donald and that tatted iron man wonder in their military speechifying...

But he squibbed it and rested on his laurels, such as they were, with this still his last appearance at time of writing ...

Brilliant plan, but hard days ahead
Trump’s new Gaza peace plan offers hope of ending the conflict, isolating Hamas while giving Netanyahu a path to withdraw and Palestinians a chance for reconstruction.
by Greg Sheridan

You've got until Friday bro, or you'll be considered hopelessly out of date and out of touch.

In the interim, while patiently waiting for the bro's assessment, the pond did a little reading, and as always, that was a dangerous thing to do.

Paul Krugman kindly keeps on sending the pond missives on assorted matters, and he had thoughts to offer, to be found here (or you too can sign up for the emails) ...

Bulging Biceps Don’t Win Modern Wars
Hegseth’s speech was vile. It was also stupid.

What could the pond do? 

Usually the pond relies on the bromancer for advice on foreign affairs, military matters, the war with China by Xmas, submarines and such like, but the pond decided to plunge in ...

Why did Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary — he may call himself secretary of war, but Congress has not, in fact, voted to change his department’s name — summon 800 top generals and admirals to Washington? I admit that I feared the worst — that he would demand that they pledge personal fealty to Donald Trump. But no: They were summoned to listen to a speech about “lethality,” followed by a highly political speech by Trump himself.
How do you achieve lethality, according to Hegseth? By telling the military that it’s OK to engage in hazing, sexual abuse and bigotry — he didn’t say that explicitly, but that was his clear message. Also, war crimes are no big deal. And members of the military, including the top brass, must shave their beards, lose weight and do pullups.
Hegseth’s speech was morally vile. It was also, however, profoundly stupid. Hegseth seems to have gotten his ideas about what an effective military looks like by watching the movie 300.
I am, of course, by no means a military expert myself. But I read and talk to people who are military experts, and think I have some idea about how modern wars are fought. Furthermore, there’s a clear family resemblance between Hegsethian stupidity about modern war and Trumpian stupidity about economic policy. Modern nations don’t achieve prosperity by emphasizing “manly” jobs; they don’t win wars by having big biceps.

The pond was outraged. The notion that some drone jockey sitting in his mum's basement could play war games was shocking. 

The Economist ran yarns about the blessings of videogames, How drones and video-game techniques are coming together in Ukraine’s war, The idea of the body count evolves

And if you trusted the globalist Graudian, it wasn't just the Ukrainians. The sociopathic Ruskis were at it too, with a devotion to child labour that only a Stalinist would love ...

Russia using children to design and test its military drones, investigation finds, Teenagers who take part in video games tell of being headhunted to work on technology used against Ukraine

Everybody knows that they'd be much better off doing weights, bulking up on steroids, and even the mystical muse of fartlek ... (sorry, fart here means speed, but having a Goons sensa human, the pond always loved the name).

Krugman was determined to get the pond agitated, and without the bromancer's able assistance, the pond was helpless to resist ...

War still requires extraordinary courage from the men and women engaged in combat — courage that, according to officers I’ve spoken with, is rooted in a sense of honor, not swaggering machismo. Combatants also have to be physically fit enough to endure incredible hardship.
But they don’t have to look like bodybuilders — and anyway, only a small fraction of a modern army engages directly in combat. These days, war is conducted largely with machines and ranged weapons, and most of an army’s personnel are employed, one way or another, keeping those machines and weapons in action and providing the intelligence that makes them effective. These noncombatants are every bit as essential to victory as front-line troops.
Actually, this has been true for a long time, at least since World War II. I very much doubt that Hegseth would consider the team led by Alan Turing, which broke Germany’s Enigma code, or the group led by Joseph Rochefort, which broke Japan’s naval code, warriors — even leaving aside the fact that Turing was gay. Yet they contributed as much to victory as any front-line soldier.
And the “warrior ethos” Hegseth touts is even less sufficient, on its own, to win wars today.

And so on, and the pond was so agitated, it expected the bromancer to rush into print forthwith to explain how tatted manly men would win. the war with China by Xmas ...

Then, following on petulant Peta's outburst this morning, which the pond had managed to avoid, Krugman was at it again ...

Fossil Fuels and Fossilized Minds
What’s driving the doomed attempt to revive coal?

Now it's possibly true that petulant Peta has a fossilised mind - something she might have picked up from the onion muncher - but this was another direct assault on the hive mind ...

Instead of terrifying snaps of hideous whale-killing machines, the pond copped this ...

I’ve just gotten back from the Netherlands, which is famous for its picturesque windmills. But wind power in Holland is more than a historical curiosity. There are also modern wind turbines almost everywhere you look, both onshore and off. And the ground is covered with dead birds and whales.
OK, not really. Wind power is, in fact, far cleaner and safer than burning fossil fuels. And I personally like the sight of wind turbines. After all, I value the comforts of modern civilization and find it reassuring to see the power needed to provide those comforts generated without harmful emissions.
But Donald Trump, as everyone knows, hates wind power and loves coal. Both passions are deeply irrational. Yet they are shaping policy.
Trump is doing his best to kill wind power, going so far as to order work halted on a mostly completed wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. (Orsted, the Danish company behind the project, has sued and gotten the stop-work order lifted.)
And the administration is trying to revive coal, opening federal land for mining, removing pollution limits and providing hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies. But why?
Administration officials would have you believe that coal mining is an economically viable industry that has been sabotaged by liberals. On Monday Chris Wright, the energy secretary, declared — in a weirdly dated culture war cliché — that coal is “out of fashion with the chardonnay set in San Francisco, Boulder, Colo., and New York City.”
The truth, however, is that coal is a dying industry for very good reasons, and anti-wokeism is unlikely to revive it.
Coal stopped being a significant source of jobs decades ago:

Dammit, he even deployed graphs, like it was some kind of ABC finance report ...

And so on, with more graphs, just like those daily ABC finance reports, an unseemly gloating about the decline and fall of coal, as if taking a trip through the hoods and hollers of West Virginia wouldn't have shown the evidence on the ground.

Why aren't the reptiles confronting this coal-bashing villain head on? 

Where's the Canavan caravan when it's  needed?

How could petulant Peta cope? Her petulance this day was all about coal and the urgent need for the coal-ition to stand by it ...

The head of the Page Research Centre, Gerard Holland, denounces this as the “big lie”, taken for granted by much of our media, that “renewables are the cheapest form of energy”.
Holland reports that “more than $170m was spent in FY23-24 alone to destroy the social licence of cheap coal power, head off any pivot towards nuclear energy, and promote a rapid transition to renewables”. He notes that “much of this money came from overseas” and it represents more than Labor and the Coalition spent combined at the May election.
But the payday is huge: “For just a few hundred million dollars in activism, corporations that stand to benefit from the transition are now reaping billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” he said.
The Page submission sets out the sustained disruption campaign developed by Greenpeace after a 2011 conference involving a who’s who of green activists that was focused on, but not limited to, the Adani mine in central Queensland and that sought some $3m from local and US sources to “build a nationwide anti-coal campaign”. The strategy, according to the activists’ paper included in the Page submission, “is essentially to ‘disrupt and delay’ key projects and infrastructure while gradually eroding public and political support for the industry”.
According to the Page submission, just the largest entities (and their 2023-24 revenues) include the Sunrise Project ($77m), Greenpeace ($25m), the Environmental Defenders Office ($18m), the Australia Institute ($11m) and Climate Action Network Australia ($7m). The Page submission characterises this anti-coal coalition as having a financial engine (the Sunrise Project), a media theatre (Greenpeace), a research arm (the Australia Institute) and a legal disrupter (the EDO).Based just on published reports, Page reckons there’s at least $11m a year (or $108m over a decade) that has flowed in from other countries to attack fossil fuel.

Eek, could Krugman and his kind be behind a vast international conspiracy?

...Two decades back, a low power price from domestically produced and locally exploited coal and natural gas was Australia’s key comparative economic advantage, at least in manufacturing. Back then, about 80 per cent of our electricity came from coal, about 10 per cent from gas and the rest was mainly from hydro.
Since then, driven by climate anxiety and consequent government mandates for an ever-greater renewable power, wind and solar are now about 30 per cent of our total electricity generation, gas and hydro remain about 10 per cent each, and coal has dropped to about 50 per cent.
Meanwhile, power prices have roughly doubled in real terms and are now about twice those in the US. And under legislation passed early in the life of the Albanese government, within just five years wind and solar power is supposed to increase to about 70 per cent of the total while coal is supposed to drop to just 10 per cent.
But at the same time as domestic use of fossil fuels has declined, and is set to decline much further, much faster, the appetite for Australian coal and gas exports has soared.
In 2005, Australian coal and gas exports totalled just $25bn; in 2024 they were $160bn and, along with iron ore, were by far our biggest export earners and a massive source of revenue to both federal and state governments. The explanation for this gulf between coal and gas use in Australia, and Australian coal and gas use overseas, lies in a largely covert and foreign-funded political campaign that’s designed to anaesthetise domestic voters into submission while, globally, emissions increase.
This agenda has never been about the planet; it’s about a funding stream to destabilise capitalist economies and finance the broader left agenda while keeping the people bearing the brunt of it literally in the dark.

Damn you Krugman and your vast international agenda and your graphs ...

King Donald's going to put an end to this nonsense and pander to petulant Princess Peta...

Think of the whales littering the Hume down Goulburn way!

Without the bromancer to guide the pond, the pond kept roaming, and stumbled on the wretched Graham Readfearn, up to his usual Graudian tricks ...

News Corp embraces fantasy genre by turning climate crisis into ‘laughable’ science fiction, The National Climate Risk Assessment is attacked in the Daily Telegraph, while wind turbines became a frightening obstacle for firefighting planes and solar panels a source of mountains of landfill waste

Outrageous, with the Daily Terror given a relentless beating.

This was just one of a number of offensive remarks ...

This week the Daily Telegraph ran a page one story – “FANNING THE FLAMES” – on how aerial firefighting support pilots were refusing to fly near “giant net zero projects” for “fear of crashing into wind turbines”.
The printed version of the story didn’t include a response from the NSW Rural Fire Service but did include comments from a retired Yass Valley group captain who had sent a report to his local council outlining concerns about wind turbines.
Greg Mullins, a former commissioner of Fire and Rescue NSW, strong advocate for climate action and still a volunteer firefighter, was not impressed.
“These are just fallacies,” he told Temperature Check. “I can’t imagine there would be more than a handful of pilots that are not skilled enough to work out the hazards in their operating space.

Dammit, everyone knows the real story is the way these infernal machines are whale killers of the first water. 

Every day in the lizard Oz the pond can see the remorseless whirling monstrosities ruining the countryside.

Why, the pond has even seen whale carcasses littering the Hume, just a ways down from the beefy boofhead's Goulburn office, and likely enough Mr fancypants Readfearn will be rushing into print to say that the pond's been seeing things as a result of spending too much time in the overripe hive mind's imaginings.

Finally while out and about the pond stumbled on this story ...

No not this one, Stephen Miller Blows Up Over Gavin Newsom Insult, though it's pretty funny, what with fascists having no sensa huma ...

This one ...

Google Accused of Blocking Searches About Trump, 79, and Dementia

There was even a nice comparison ...

Be beast of course means be beastly good at ripping off stories in the Daily Mail style, and the original could be found at The Verge as Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia.

...There’s been a lot of coverage of the mental acuity of both President Trump and President Biden, who are the two oldest presidents ever, so it’s reasonable to expect that people might query Google about it. The company may be worried about accurately presenting information on a sensitive subject, as AI overviews remain susceptible to delivering incorrect information. But in this case, it may also be worried about the president’s response to such information. Google agreed this week to pay $24.5 million to settle a highly questionable lawsuit about Trump’s account being banned from YouTube.
Google spokesperson Davis Thompson didn’t say why AI overviews weren’t triggered for these queries when asked by The Verge. “As we’ve said, AI Overviews and AI Mode won’t show a response to every query.” Thompson also pointed to a document that explains how AI Overviews may not show for every query and that AI Mode may choose to show links instead of generating a response.

Yeah yeah, sure ...

Now the pond would have caught up with the bromancer if he'd acted as a genuine "foreign editor", but it seems that only talk of white Xian nationalism really gets him going - surely Pete should have qualified? - and as the pond has been speaking of drones and vulgar youff in mum's basement playing video games, the pond must end this late arvo post with a TT ...

Come on bromancer, where's your sense of entertainment? 

Even Colbear (as YouTube's CCs call him, the money to improve the bot having been sent to King Donald) could see the light side ...