He's baaack ... and so is Killer of the IPA ... the bromancer lives, and after many preliminaries, the pond will get to that dance ...

 

Gutless. Cowardly. Shameful. A weak-kneed flip-flopping bout of whining both siderism.

But typical, providing yet another reason not a drop of the pond's money goes to the Nine rags ...

Wilcox cartoon was divisive – and we apologise for the hurt it has caused (*archive link)
The Herald's View
Updated January 11, 2026 — 3.55pm first published at 3.50pm

Even more pathetic was the timid way they dropped it late on a Sunday arvo ...

Inter alia ...

When the pond checked, despite the mealy-mouthed carryon and craven cavorting, the 'toon was still to be found (in 'cartoons of the week', not in 'best of Wilcox'), but the cartoon section seemed to be in a paralysed stasis.

Naturally the reptiles were still on the case. 

When they sense weakness, they go for the throat and hang on like a pitbull ... and offer up outrageous slurs:

Cartoon on royal commission evoked a centuries-old trope about the power of Jews
Conflating anti-Semitism with Middle East politics forces many good people into silence, but being against anti-Semitism does not mean you support Benjamin Netanyahu. (that's an archive link)
By Catherine West

Amazingly, for a cartoon one step short of Adolf, or perhaps Martin Luther, the reptiles managed to reproduce it yet again.

Meanwhile,  the Writers' Festival fuss continued, with SBS on the weekend reporting that board members are now dropping out like hippies on Haight-Ashbury. The chair led the way.

A feeble counter-attack was mounted with reports that Randa Abdel-Fattah joined a cabal to get Thomas Friedman banned the previous year, but the obvious retort is that any Festival that would have Friedman as a speaker must be subject to the Groucho rule - that's not a club anyone should want to belong to.

The reptiles were on that case, with Nick on hand to conflate and confuse...

Writer’s ban about double standards, not free speech
Randa Abdel Fattah’s Writers’ Week punting is an overdue reckoning for cultural hypocrisy. (that's an intermittent archive link)
By Nick Dyrenfurth

Ain't he a wonder. Dropping a writer for political reasons or nervous nelly Adelaide great aunt sensitivities ain't about free speech? George would be proud.

The lizard Oz editorialist also chipped in with a profoundly ironical headline, what with the lizard Oz being a font of hate and endless jihads ...

Cultural left is conspicuous in its tolerance for hate
The stampede by authors to support anti-Israel author Randa Abdel-Fattah shows the extent to which toxic anti-Semitic ideology has been allowed to seep into our institutions.

This from a rag that has been spreading its special brand of poison for decades.

How weird did it get?

EXCLUSIVE
Put immigration policy on royal commission’s agenda: Lowy
Business leader Steven Lowy says freedom and tolerance in Australia is being abused and bigger cultural change is needed.
By Richard Ferguson and Sarah Ison

That was just a seafood extender EXCLUSIVE based on this offering ...

Bondi Beach attack was our wake-up call to act
The Royal Commission into anti-Semitism is welcome, but it cannot be seen as the end of the matter.
By Steven Lowy

If we're going to go down the 'ban Islamics like King Donald wanted to' route, then surely the RC must look into the hate speech emanating from News Corp. This can't be seen as the end of the matter. 

Surely the RC must look to expropriating the assets of a foreign owned disrupter of community harmony?

But chinks are beginning to appear in the reptiles' latest jihad.

The reptiles seem to have begun to realise that there were other things happening in the world, and that a monomaniacal obsession with turning a terrorist slaughter into a political wedge might be a turn off. So they turned on ...

Yes, big splashes and three whole stories, and luckily there's no need to go there, because anyone interested can find the details outside the hive mind.

Speaking of the real world, the pond noticed this yarn in Wired ... it's possibly not the time for the reptiles to indulge in their usual bout of climate science denialism, but just in case ...

The Oceans Just Keep Getting Hotter
For the eighth year in a row, the world’s oceans absorbed a record-breaking amount of heat in 2025. It was equivalent to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools. (here's an intermittent archive link for anyone who might hit a wall).

The opening, a teaser trailer:

Since 2018, a group of researchers from around the world have crunched the numbers on how much heat the world’s oceans are absorbing each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world’s oceans have absorbed more heat than the years before.
The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world’s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules’ worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That’s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules they absorbed in 2024. The research comes from a team of more than 50 scientists across the United States, Europe, and China.
A joule is a common way to measure energy. A single joule is a relatively small unit of measurement—it’s about enough to power a tiny lightbulb for a second, or slightly heat a gram of water. But a zettajoule is one sextillion joules; numerically, the 23 zettajoules the oceans absorbed this year can be written out as 23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
John Abraham, a professor of thermal science at the University of St. Thomas and one of the authors on the paper, says that he sometimes has trouble putting this number into contexts laypeople understand. Abraham offers up a couple options. His favorite is comparing the energy stored in the ocean to the energy of atomic bombs: The 2025 warming, he says, is the energetic equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean. (Some other calculations he’s done include equating this number to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or more than 200 times the electrical use of everyone on the planet.)
“Last year was a bonkers, crazy warming year—that's the technical term,” Abraham joked to me. “The peer-reviewed scientific term is ‘bonkers’.”
The world’s oceans are its largest heat sink, absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess warming that is trapped in the atmosphere. While some of the excess heat warms the ocean’s surface, it also slowly travels further down into deeper parts of the ocean, aided by circulation and currents.
Global temperature calculations—like the ones used to determine the hottest years on record—usually only capture measurements taken at the ocean’s surface. (The study finds that overall sea surface temperatures in 2025 were slightly lower than they were in 2024, which is on record as the hottest year since modern records began. Some meteorological phenomena, like El Niño events, can also raise sea surface temperatures in certain regions, which can cause the overall ocean to absorb slightly less heat in a given year. This helps to explain why there was such a big jump in added ocean heat content between 2025, which developed a weak La Niña at the end of the year, and 2024, which came at the end of a strong El Niño year.) While sea surface temperatures have risen since the industrial revolution, thanks to our use of fossil fuels, these measurements don’t provide a full picture of how climate change is affecting the oceans.
“If the whole world was covered by a shallow ocean that was only a couple feet deep, it would warm up more or less at the same speed as the land,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth and a coauthor of the study. “But because so much of that heat is going down in the deep ocean, we see generally slower warming of sea surface temperatures [than those on land].”

And so on, and at last the pond can speak science ... bonkers ... and there must be a 'toon for all that ...

...and speaking of bonkers, there was another astonishing disruption to the jihad.

At the top of the lizard Oz the jihad took a new turn. There was a new topic, a new target ...

And best of all?

He's baaack ...

Little Greggie with his axe, ready to pound away at assorted doors.

Oh how the pond has waited, oh how correspondents have yearned ...

It's only a three minute read, so the reptiles said, but the pond fell on it like a famished hound that hadn't had a feed in a month:

The header: Ayatollah beware, your brutal Islamo-Stalinst regime is under its greatest threat since 1979, The Iranian regime is still in overall control and becoming vastly more brutal in its crackdown. But neither its survival, nor its collapse, is sure. These demonstrations are unlike anything in post-revolutionary Iran.

The caption: An image showing protesters once again taking to the streets of Tehran despite an intensifying crackdown as the Islamic Republic remains cut off from the rest of the world. (UGC via AP)

Now it's true that the bromancer is in jihad mode, but when is he not?

It's also true that the only apparent difference these days between the mad Mullahs and King Donald is scale.

While King Donald's minions casually murder US citizens in the streets, the mad Mullahs really know how to do it, and indulge in senseless slaughter.

That said, forget King Donald's inclination to authoritarianism.

The bromancer is a specialist in selective rage and singular vision, so he had at the mad Mullahs ...

The dark and murderous vision of theocratic blackness and hatred of the West, and of Jews, which lies at the heart of the Iranian revolution, is under greater threat today than at any time since 1979.
The ayatollahs’ Islamo-Stalinist regime is being challenged by the people who know it best, the Iranian people. Iran is experiencing its biggest anti-government demonstrations since the 1979 overthrow of the shah.
As recently as a week ago, US intelligence assessed that the demonstrations lacked the strength to offer an existential threat to the rule of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the whole theocratic regime. Now, that analysis is much less certain. The protests have been running intensely for two weeks. Tehran has shut down the internet within Iran. When it did this in 2019, it provided cover for widespread massacres of protesters.
Something similar is under way now. Iranian hospitals are overwhelmed trying to treat shot and beaten protesters. Hundreds are dead, thousands imprisoned. Initially, there was some effort by Iranian government leaders to address economic distress and promise mild reform. That tone has now gone entirely. The government now calls protesters “enemies of God”, which means they face the death penalty. Nonetheless, images still emerge of government buildings in flames and huge demonstrations – in at least one case of a million people – in Iranian cities.

The reptiles flung in an AV distraction, Unrest across Iran is escalating as the regime cracks down on government protests amid a major internet blackout.

The bromancer carried on, and who would defend the mad Mullahs against his foam-flecked rage?

The ayatollahs have faced waves of huge demonstrations before. Dictatorships typically fall in one of four circumstances – when they begin to liberalise, when the leadership becomes divided and some side with the protesters, when a government loses administrative capability or when an outside power decisively assists the revolutionaries.
The Iranian regime is still in overall control and becoming vastly more brutal in its crackdown. But neither its survival, nor its collapse, is sure. The next weeks are critical. These demonstrations are unlike anything in post-revolutionary Iran.
First, they are at their foundation economic, initially led by shopkeepers, a class slow to anger but dreadfully dangerous to any regime. Iran, inheritor of the great Persian civilisation, has a sophisticated urban class that hates the regime. But that class alone can never prevail. These demonstrations include the working class, unionists, farmers, villagers.
Secondly, it’s clear now to all Iranians except for devoted theocrats and the ruling class itself that the Islamic revolution has brought nothing but misery and despair. The people hate the regime and hate the way they are forced to live.

Then came another visual interruption: This image from a video released on January 9, 2026, by Iranian state television shows a man holding a device to document burning vehicles during a night of mass protests in Zanjan, Iran. (Iranian state TV via AP)

The bromancer saw King Donald as an avenging angel, and never mind the vengeance doled out by his ICE minions:

Third, the regime is weaker than it’s been for decades. The relentless pursuit of the nuclear program, designed to provide an Iranian bomb, has delivered nothing but sanctions and the devastating Israeli and US military strikes. As with Venezuela, vaunted air defences proved worthless.
The Iranian leaders made a terrible blunder, perhaps on a par with Nicolas Maduro’s miscalculations in Venezuela, in refusing US President Donald Trump’s offer of economic engagement in exchange for abandoning the nuclear program. The Iranian people yearned for such a deal, for normality and prosperity.
Importantly, all those analysts, who represented a strong consensus among the international relations class, who argued that Israeli and US strikes would only unify Iranian sentiment behind the government and against the West have been proven completely wrong. Far from experiencing a patriotic surge of support, the Iranian government has never been more comprehensively loathed by its own people, who daily risk death in trying to change the regime.

There came a final visual distraction, This image, taken from anonymous user-generated video via AFPTV on January 10, 2026 shows a protester pulling down the Iranian flag from the balcony of Iran's embassy in central London. (Photo by Handout / various sources / AFP)

A hint of doubt crept into the narrative:

Trump has threatened to strike Iran if it kills its people in large numbers, as it has done in previous crackdowns. It’s hard to see how this would lead directly to regime change. But it’s a remarkable intervention. The US President is backing demonstrators seeking freedom and, as far as we can tell, the demonstrators are glad of any support they can get.

Yes, they can die in the streets, while King Donald makes vague threats and useless promises.

And then came an astonishing rewriting of history, as only the bromancer can do ...

Then there’s the role of the exiled crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah to rule Iran. The shah lost power not because he was too brutal, though his rule was brutal, but because he began to liberalise and provided space for the organised Islamist forces to lead a broad social movement, which they betrayed as soon as they seized power.

The Shah a liberal? C.f. the wiki on the subject...

The revolution was fueled by widespread perceptions of the Shah's regime as corrupt, repressive, and overly reliant on foreign powers, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom. Many Iranians felt that the Shah's government was not acting in the best interests of the Iranian people and that it was too closely aligned with Western interests, especially at the expense of Iranian sovereignty and cultural identity.

There were many other reasons - see the wiki for a detailed breakdown of events - but the result was most unfortunate, a classic case of jumping from the frypan into the fire, of the kind that King Donald supporters have done as they FAFO'd.

The bromancer couldn't resist one final illiberal flourish, worthy of a Khomeini:

One factor in the regime’s favour this time is that it’s unclear that the protesters, courageous as they are, have coherent leadership. But protesters have responded in surprising numbers to Pahlavi’s calls to take specific actions on specific days, and have taken to displaying the old lion-and-sun flag of pre-revolutionary Iran. The enduring appeal of monarchy in the Islamic world asserts itself once more.
The Iranian government characterises the vast social movement it’s confronting as an Israeli conspiracy, like Cathy Wilcox cartoon writ large.
Brave Iranians are daily dying for freedom. Naturally there are no left-wing demonstrations in their support in the West. But they do have Trump.

He had to drag Wilcox into the affair? 

And he dismissed King Donald with an imperious wave of the bromancer hand?

And the world still cast in that black and white, leftists bad, King Donald if not good, then somewhat endearing mind set?

Oh he'll never change, he'll always be the same old lover of the onion muncher ...and with any luck he'll help steer the lizard Oz into new jihads and provide ways for the pond to avoid the current RC jihad.

As for King Donald, luckily Killer of the IPA was on hand to talk about the monster in affectionate terms.

Sure it's day old stuff, but when has Killer of the IPA ever tasted stale and soggy?

The header: Trump’s ‘shock and awe’ in Venezuela reveals US naked self-interest; Trump’s brazen Venezuelan intervention has finally buried the so-called rules-based global order that never truly existed, leaving Australia in an awkward position.

The caption for the king in sociopathic smirk mode: President Donald Trump. ‘For all Trump’s talk of peace and the presumed isolationist bent of his administration, the President already has bombed at least a half-dozen countries.’ Picture: AP

Killer spoke in favour of King Donald the way a fervent Stephen Miller might manage. 

It was realpolitik all the way.

Henry Kissinger would have been proud. 

Perhaps not since Theodore Roosevelt has a US president been so blunt about the real reason America intervenes abroad: naked self-interest.
Members of Donald Trump’s MAGA base shouldn’t fear their children are about to die in the jungles of Venezuela in another doomed attempt to export democracy. They should admire their President’s candour.
Trump made no serious effort to cloak the seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, last week in the familiar language of freedom, humanitarianism or international law.
Instead, Trump spoke openly about monopolising Venezuela’s vast oil reserves for American benefit – a clarity that finally buried the so-called rules-based global order, which never truly existed anyway.
It’s hard to imagine even those diehard spruikers of the fictitious global order, Defence Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, uttering the phrase for years now that the ultimate guarantor of our security didn’t even attempt to cloak its brazen intervention as anything other than America First.
The outrage was understandable among the UN set – many thousands of high-paying bureaucratic jobs hinge on at least lip service to international law – but not the surprise.
For all Trump’s talk of peace and the presumed isolationist bent of his administration, the President already has bombed at least a half-dozen countries – including Somalia, Nigeria and Iran – not even one year into his second term. That’s far more than Joe Biden did in his entire four years in office.
The Venezuela move was “shock and awe”, Trump-style: no boots on the ground, no rhetoric about democracy or the enforcement of international law.
Trump was putting his administration’s freshly minted national security strategy into action.
“We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere,” the 33-page security strategy document states, describing what it calls the “Trump corollary” to the well-known Monroe Doctrine.

Cue an AV distraction featuring an image likely to stir a reptile almost as much as a lump of coal:  U.S. President Donald Trump began a meeting to discuss Venezuela with executives from some of the world's largest oil companies at the White House on Friday, saying he wants them to invest $100 billion in the country to vastly expand its production. Alex Cohen has more.

Killer saw it all as a glorious, unambiguous triumph:

It remains an unambiguous victory for Trump, who has shaken off the TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) accusation, and the US, which demonstrated its unrivalled ability to project power only months after a brilliant high-stakes bombing operation in Iran.
Whatever cover Trump’s “illegal” action supposedly gives Russia and China to behave similarly is dwarfed by their military and economic humiliation.
Energy-poor China, which must import about three-quarters of its oil, had seen Venezuela as a reliable supplier. Meanwhile Trump has deprived Moscow of billions of dollars’ worth of future arms sales to Caracas and highlighted the worthlessness of a freshly inked strategic partnership that Maduro signed with Russia last year.

But then came the downers, with several very big billy goat butts:

But the tactical success of Trump’s intervention victory could easily become a long-term strategic loss, not to mention the ongoing awkwardness for Australia in particular.
Venezuela’s oil reserves, which oil-exporting America doesn’t even need, are no El Dorado, costing more to extract per barrel than the prevailing oil price, owing to their poor quality and the difficulties of pumping them.
Top US oil executives, predictably, told Trump at the White House last week they wouldn’t invest the $US100bn ($149bn) required to update Venezuela’s dilapidated oil infrastructure without investment certainty, which is impossible without US boots on the ground – something Trump is unlikely to countenance.
The Venezuelan military, not to mention the families of the 80-odd Venezuelans killed in the US operation, aren’t likely to warm to US orders in coming months.
Maduro’s regime, which has brazenly stolen elections and presided over one of the biggest collapses in national income of any nation in modern history, is still in control.
New interim president Delcy Rodriguez, a veteran left-wing revolutionary, has a track record of publicly hating the US. Trump’s disregard for opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who symbolically offered her Nobel Peace Prize to the US President, won’t please pro-democracy forces within Venezuela either; they’ve realised their initial dancing in the street at the prospect of a new democratic government was rather premature.

Hah, hapless peasants, how Killer chortled with glee, as the reptiles interrupted with another AV distraction (is Killer that boring he always needs some relief?): Two leading members of Venezuela's political opposition were freed in a prisoner release on Thursday (January 8), according to local rights group Foro Penal and videos shared by Venezuelan journalists.

Downsides hurled into the distance, Killer carried on with his Millerisms:

Even if the US could miraculously lift Venezuelan output from roughly one million barrels a day to the three million it once produced in the 1970s, OPEC simply would adjust supply to neutralise any meaningful price impact. The US doesn’t even need the oil.
What Trump has achieved is a tactical victory, not a strategic one – and potentially a long-term loss. His audacious act will harden opposition to the US, which is no longer as relatively powerful as it once was in the immediate aftermath of the World War II era.
The spectacle of the US, home to only 4 per cent of the world’s population, dragging a foreign leader of a mid-sized nation before a domestic US court, whatever the accuracy of the charges, won’t sit well with many actual and future heads of state.
Russia and China, not to mention other South American nations, newly fearful of US power, will have strong incentives to redouble their defence spending and in particular their counter-espionage operations.
Trump publicly slammed US defence contractor Raytheon last week, but that industry is the only clear winner long term.
Almost two years ago I wrote an unpopular column in these pages arguing “there is not, and never was, a rules-based global order, despite our politicians’ fondness for evoking it”. I hate to gloat but we now have yet more evidence.
That’s cold comfort, though, given Australia’s near total reliance on the US – a nation most of our biggest trading partners and neighbours must privately if not publicly loathe even more – for our defence.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

What odd discordant notes on the back palate.

Cold comfort aside, is there any difference between Killer and his heroes?

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper of CNN on Monday, during a combative appearance in which he was pressed on Mr. Trump’s long-held desire to control Greenland.
“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said.

How Adolf would have been proud, and there's more for those with a taste for it at the both siderist NY Times (intermittent archive link):

Stephen Miller Offers a Strongman’s View of the World
President Trump’s trusted adviser is casting his hard-right gaze abroad, saying the world must be governed by “force.” 

Why is it that weedy types of the vampire Miller and Killer of the IPA kind are so devoted to the notion of brute power?

Did they suffer in childhood?

Roll on the taking of Greenland, and after that Canada (elbows up Canucks), with Killer of the IPA cheering from the sidelines; roll on Vlad the sociopath and his attempts to expand his repressive regime, with Killer of the IPA congratulating him on so much winning ...

For that matter, roll on mad Mullahs, with your repression just part of the iron laws that ruled the world since the beginning of time.

As for being an Xian, what the heck was that all about? Love, it seems, comes out of the barrel of a gun.

Watch out New Zealand, so many sheep make you a tempting target for Albo seeking a distraction from his woes ...

And so to finish with a few 'toons ...