In which Our Henry returns for new year celebrations, with a bonus malicious Magnay ...

 

As the Australian Daily Zionist News continues its current jihad, hapless Susssan wandered off into a semantic word salad...

Because the Zionist News section of the lizard Oz is under a prohibitorum at the pond, this reading is taken from the Graudian and its rolling coverage ...

Sussan Ley clarifies claim about ‘far-left neo-Nazis’
Josh Butler

Going back to Sussan Ley’s press conference earlier this morning: the opposition leader has attempted to clean up what might have been another important error, where she said a royal commission should investigate “far-left neo-Nazi extremism”.
Nazism and neo-Nazism is generally accepted as being an extreme right ideology, including by the United States Holocaust Museum, the Southern Poverty Law Centre and Asio’s director general, Mike Burgess.
Key figures in Australia’s neo-Nazi movements have called for the intake of migrants to be slashed or halted altogether, targeted Indigenous Australians and rallied against transgender Australians.
Ley, in her press conference, demanded a royal commission after the Bondi attack “must include reference to radical Islamic extremism as well as far-left Neo-Nazi extremism”.
Questioned later whether she thought neo-Nazis were left-wing, Ley initially downplayed the question by saying “these are political concepts about left and right, but what is most important is that radical Islamic extremism and Neo-Nazi ideology, however people may choose to frame that in a left-right continuum, that they are included”.
Asked again to clarify, she claimed: “far-left and neo-Nazi extremism were the words I used”, stressing “and” between the two concepts - a word she did not use in her initial comment.
It was potentially a misspeak while reading off notes. In an earlier written statement on a royal commission, Ley called for investigating “the role of radical Islamic extremism, as well as far left and neo Nazi extremism”.
It comes after Ley mistakenly referred to Russia as the Soviet Union last week, saying “the government should always stand ready to support the illegal occupation of Ukraine by the USSR”. Her office updated the official press conference transcript to replace the USSR and Soviet Union mentions with “Russia”.

Ah, it gets them every time. 

The far right routinely uses this escape hatch, beguiled by the "socialist" in National Socialism, and never mind that Herr Adolf loathed the filthy Commie swine, and vice versa, whatever that Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the brief sharing of Poland's spoils ...

Speaking of Nazi swine ...

The Wrath of Stephen Miller
The man who turns President Trump’s most incendiary impulses into policy (*archive link)
By Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Nick Miroff

Even his allies find Miller to be something of an “acquired taste,” as one put it. Another quipped that he has the bedside manner of Heinrich Himmler, one of Adolf Hitler’s earliest followers and a key architect of the Holocaust. 

Speaking of deep mysteries...

J. D. Vance’s Notable Absence on Venezuela
Was the Vice-President’s exclusion from the operation in Venezuela an expression of his anti-interventionist ideology—or a political calculation? (*archive link)
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Another sidebar:

Notorious M.T.G.
Marjorie Taylor Greene split with the President over the Epstein files; then she quit her job in Congress. Where will she go from here? Charles Bethea reports. (*archive link)

Good old Marge.

Canny with money, but still barking mad, the mystery of Marge suddenly became clear:

Her father ran a construction company, Taylor Commercial, and dabbled in pseudoscience. He once published an essay called “The Taylor Effect,” in which he claims to have discovered “an undeniable correlation” between stock-market prices and “the relative positions of the sun, earth, and moon.” 

Apple. Tree. Falling not far from...

The pond would also like to have taken up the ongoing story of the malicious Minns - the pond didn't vote for him in the past, certainly won't vote for him in the future - but a First Dog snippet will have to suffice:

That's more than enough history lessons for today, but there is one upside ...the lettuce had thought of giving the game away in the new year, but Susssan keeps on offering reasons to keep playing. 

With the Zionist News interdiction in place, the pond's choices are again limited. 

The pond has never seen this level of frothing, foaming frenzy carry on for such a long time - it's up there with climate science denialism - and this day LeLievre did his best to evoke the hive mind's squawking, but had to defame seagulls to do it ...

Never mind,  there are still nuggets outside the Zionist News juggernaut that pop up to keep herpetology students engaged, and delight of delights, Our Henry has turned up - on a Thursday! - and the pond seized the offering like a famished seagull offered a prize chip. 

He's no bromancer - now MIA since 27th December - but for once he's not part of that other jihad:

The header celebrating Our Henry's desire to be a lawless anarchist: Maduro had to go, but Trump should heed lessons of the past, If safeguarding the national interest and making the world a better place require actions contrary to international law, democratic governments have the right and obligation to set it aside.

The caption for the endlessly repeated sketch, which has led some comedians to joke that the artist must have been a left over from King Donald's trial: In this courtroom sketch, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, left, and his wife, Cilia Flores appear in Manhattan federal court with their defence attorneys on Monday. Picture: Elizabeth Williams via AP

Wilcox pretty much summed up Our Henry's argument:

Some of Our Henry's keenest kult followers might be disappointed by this recitation, which is very light on portentous, pompous references to ancient times:

In the early hours of Wednesday, December 20, 1989, US forces launched Operation Just Cause, executing co-ordinated airborne, air assault and ground attacks against Panamanian Defence Forces targets including Torrijos-Tocumen International Airport and key command sites in Panama City.
The operation’s immediate objectives were to capture Manuel Noriega, shatter the PDF’s command structure and avert a protracted guerrilla campaign that could have driven up American casualties.
Final authorisation was given by president George HW Bush a few days earlier at the White House Christmas party, shortly after he learned that PDF troops had killed US Marine Corps Lieutenant Robert Paz, tortured a US Navy SEAL and sexually assaulted the SEAL’s wife.
That incident, however, merely triggered a decision shaped by months of military planning and escalating diplomatic confrontation. Steadily increasing pressure had been applied to Noriega to step down, including offers of safe passage to any country willing to grant him asylum.
But Noriega, who had crushed an attempted coup only months earlier, concluded that Bush would not assume the risks of resorting to force. Acting on that belief, he intensified political repression, expanded narcotics smuggling and money laundering, and issued increasingly strident threats to the free passage of American shipping through the Panama Canal.

Ah, the Noriega ploy, and never mind King Donald pardoning one time Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández, Manuel Noriega in October 1989 in Panama before his arrest in a US military invasion that resulted in him being charged in January 1990 in Miami. Picture: AFP

What's 400 tons of cocaine between good drug-loving chums?

Our Henry carried on ...

Washington’s response was cautious and graduated. Just six years earlier, the invasion of Grenada had exposed crippling failures in inter-service co-ordination, intelligence sharing and command authority – deficiencies that prompted the far-reaching reforms embodied in the Goldwater-Nichols Act.
Determined to avoid another conspicuous military embarrassment, the Bush administration made operational coherence its overriding priority.
Enormous effort was therefore devoted to planning a complex joint campaign involving all four services, several civilian agencies and nearly 27,000 troops, executed with a level of co-ordination that would become one of the operation’s most consequential legacies.
Recently declassified material shows Just Cause’s implementation was far from flawless. Its apparent success owed much to an unusually favourable conjunction of factors: disorganised enemy resistance; a well-prepared US military; and a broadly supportive domestic political environment.
Even more important, US forces – continuously present in Panama for nearly 90 years – were intimately familiar with the terrain and with the Panamanian military, which they had largely created, trained and equipped.
Despite the role these contingencies played, the operation reinforced emerging ideas about rapid, decisive joint action. Those ideas crystallised in the 2000 Defence Planning Guidance, which directed the US Joint Forces Command to “develop a new war-fighting concept and capabilities to rapidly and decisively conduct particularly challenging and important operational missions”. That framework would later guide US regime-targeting efforts in far less permissive settings including, most recently, the capture of Nicolas Maduro.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an overly familiar recitation of events in a series of breakout boxes.

These had already featured in previous reptile yarns and therefore in the pond, and so it was with gritted teeth that the pond stayed true and fair to Our Henry's presentation.

Please, make room, the humourless pedant will be back soon ...

Sheesh, the pond realises it's the silly season, and canny recycling is all the go, but really reptiles? There's caring for the environment, and then there's pointless, slack as, silly season repetition.

Enough already, time to get back to the pompous pedant ...

The greatest failures, however, lay in the management of Just Cause’s aftermath. Military leaders underestimated the breakdown in law and order that would follow the PDF’s collapse.
As the US tried to bring widespread looting under control, the transition from combat operations to civilian policing was bungled, as was post-conflict planning more generally.
Here, too, eventual success reflected circumstance rather than foresight. Noriega’s authoritarian rule had been relatively brief and served to unify rather than fragment the Panamanian elite. Even within his own party he was unpopular; aided by a sweeping amnesty, its leaders quickly made their peace with traditional forces, converting the party into an effective electoral machine. There was little infrastructure damage – most importantly to the revenue-generating canal – facilitating and funding the prompt restoration of public services.
Together, these factors enabled constitutional reforms that cemented Panama’s democratic transition and inaugurated prolonged economic growth.
But while the military lessons of Panama were carefully absorbed, the political ones were not.
And it is apparent to anyone familiar with Latin America that the conditions critical to success in Panama are not present in Venezuela.
Decades of Chavismo, compounded by the mass emigration of educated Venezuelans, have hollowed out the elites that once anchored the 1958 Pacto de Punto Fijo, an elite agreement intended to stabilise democracy after decades of coups.
The regime’s security forces, backed by Cuba and Russia, remain intact, as do its strongmen, including Diosdado Cabello, the primary powerbroker in Maduro’s party. Nor is there any obvious reason to believe those forces would readily relinquish control over the country’s dwindling but still lucrative oil rents.

The reptiles decided to remind the hive mind that this was a regime change without much of a change of the regime, Venezuela's Minister of Interior Diosdado Cabello speaks at a women's rally in support of ousted Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in Caracas on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

But then King Donald had higher, more noble matters in mind ...

Our Henry did at least wander back into the past far enough to help with the Donroe doctrine:

The social fractures Chavismo exploited are also far deeper and more bitter than those that existed in Panama. Overall, Chavismo’s foundations appear stirred but not decisively shaken.
It is consequently one thing to extricate a single leader and quite another to dismantle an entrenched system of corrupt authoritarian rule. It may be that the Trump administration has struck a viable bargain with a faction of the Chavist leadership.
But it is equally possible that the US will once again reap the consequences that befell Theodore Roosevelt’s muscular reinterpretation, in 1904, of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine – an approach Donald Trump has sought to revive and adapt.
The interventions launched under Roosevelt’s “corollary” almost invariably produced greater instability, with warring factions competing to secure or to conspicuously resist Washington’s actions. Historian Louis A. Perez Jr has shown that the resulting disorder – usually accompanied by explosive violence – repeatedly drew the US into local struggles, rendering intervention “a self-perpetuating process” in which “more intervention required more intervention”.
Those cascading entanglements – which, despite his avowed commitment to self-determination, reached their zenith under Woodrow Wilson – proved as costly as they were ineffective, durably eroding America’s standing.
Fully mindful of those consequences, Franklin Delano Roosevelt immediately abandoned the policy his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, had inaugurated.
It is, of course, too early to say with confidence whether that pattern will reassert itself.

Too early?

The reptiles helped our Henry with the tag for this visual interruption, If the sole result is to bring Nicolas Maduro to justice, the operation may prove worthwhile. Picture: WABC via AP

Surely there will be other benefits?

Our Henry then wrapped up his contribution ...

Yet even if the sole result is to bring Maduro to justice and underscore to the world’s dictators the reach of American power, the operation may prove well worthwhile: it is only when autocrats cannot sleep at night that democracies can rest easy.
The alleged damage to international law does nothing to diminish those potential gains. Despite the usual bleating, it is deeply confused to believe there is a moral obligation to respect international law, which lacks the procedural and substantive legitimacy of domestic law in well-ordered democratic states. Shaped in part by autocracies and enforced highly selectively – all too often against democracies – what passes as international law cannot be presumed to do more good than harm.
Nor is it democracies’ breaches of international law that cause authoritarian states and their proxies to be law-breakers; it is those states’ conviction that democracies will stand by, scrupulously observing international law, as they tear the rules to shreds. If safeguarding the national interest and making the world a better place require actions contrary to international law, democratic governments have the right and obligation to set it aside.
But they must do so with both eyes open – not least to historical experience. Whether this operation displays that degree of prudence will determine whether Trump deserves the acclamation he so eagerly seeks.

International law? Bah bleating humbugs.

The hole in bucket man has spoken, and what a relief. 

Talk of that muck is so much nonsense, let us have at it tooth and claw, the strong shall bully the meek and the weak, nations may run amok, authoritarians in power can waving the fig leaf of democracy, and Greenland? 

SOON, with Our Henry's blessing.

He's not the bromancer, but Our Henry's a very naughty boy, and surely Babe, that'll do, that'll do ...

Speaking of Greenland, the malicious Magnay was on hand to help pave that path ...

The header: NATO or bust? Not everyone hates Trump’s Greenland takeover, In Svalbard, which is nervously watching the Kremlin’s interest in the high north, some believe a US presence in Greenland may provide a buffer against Russian exploitation of the Arctic.

The ticking clock that showed magnificent Magnay was already long in tooth: January 7, 2026 - 5:41PM

The caption for the meaningless illustration of a few houses: Spitsbergen in Svalbard. Picture: iStock.

Please, that header offered King Donald great hope, and by means of an "on the face of it", the malignant Magnay began with a clever variation on billy goat butt themes:

On the face of it, Donald Trump’s plan to control Greenland – by purchase, by treaty or by force – appears intimidating and outrageous.

Well yes ...

But not to a reptile. Please, magnanimous Magnay explain why, and please try to keep it to a two minute read, as timed by the reptiles:

Greenland was once a colony of NATO member Denmark and now has a form of self-rule, although the Danish still control the foreign and defence policies and the country’s currency.
If President Trump can’t acquire the autonomous territory by money or persuasion – and instead uses the US military, Article 5 of the NATO treaty is at danger of being ripped apart.

Oh dear, that sounds just like what Vlad the Sociopath would want, but the pond is sure that it's all for the best in a hive mind world.

At this point the reptiles indulged in another big breakout box showing all the temptations to hand for imperialistic King Donald.

What with Our Henry proclaiming that international law isn't worth a fig, why not head off to capture all the treasure, as colonialists from ancient times on are wont to do?

The result looks like one of those wretched displays that once made life in school classrooms interminable, but the pond must stay true to the reptile vision, the colonial dreaming as it were ...

Did the pond just spot that line "strong hydropower and wind potential as the climate warms"?

Dear sweet long absent lord, have the reptiles already forgotten that the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way is at one with King Donald when it comes to whale-killing windmills, and what's this talk of the climate warming?

Has the pond sat through decades of lizard Oz climate science denialism only to be told that the climate is actually warming?

Enough already reptiles, the pond was sold on the dream ...

The magisterial, magnetic Magnay continued with the dream ...

Having one NATO member attack another is so unthinkable that the NATO rules, drawn up in 1948 which dictate that an attack on one is an attack on all, don’t even reference such a scenario.
Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen said on Tuesday (AEDT) that if the US chose to attack another NATO country then everything, including European security “will stop”.
Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain have joined Denmark in saying that they would defend the “universal principles” of “sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders”.

At this point the reptiles introduced a crazed Canuck. 

Elbows down, Canada, let King Donald have his way, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday (January 6) that only Denmark and Greenland should decide the Arctic island's future, after U.S. remarks raised annexation concerns. He also said that Canadian oil will remain competitive even if Venezuela boosts output following the U.S. seizure of President Nicolas Maduro.

Has the pond shoved in every cartoon and riff it can find to ease the boredom? Indeed it has, especially if it featured hapless Europeans ...

It was time for the malevolent Magnay to help the cheese eating surrender monkeys to fold like a pack of Alice's playing cards ...

But will the 31 European NATO countries risk dismantling their collective security – especially in a precarious time of the Russian war with Ukraine – to defend Greenland, a country of just 60,000 people?
Quite apart from anything else, while European nations have recently ramped up defence spending, the US remains the overwhelming funder and technological backbone of NATO.
I was in Svalbard a few months ago – the northernmost settlement in the Arctic controlled by Norway – which is nervously watching the Kremlin eye the Northwest passage for shorter trade routes.

Yes, yes, there's nothing like maintaining world order by smashing it to smithereens, as the reptiles decided this was the moment to introduce a bit of a downer ...

Danish Foreign Correspondent Jesper Steinmetz claims European countries are facing a potential “very dangerous situation” amid the Trump administration’s threat to acquire Greenland. “Donald Trump has the power to basically tell European and other allies, well, you want me to help you in Ukraine, but you don’t want to help me when it comes to Greenland, so you know what? I’m not ready to stay in Ukraine, I’m not ready to extend the US helping with intelligence and others,” he said. “So, in that respect, it’s a very dangerous situation potentially for the European countries. “It will be very interesting to see if they have that backbone if they are under that pressure at that time.” This comes as the United States recently escalated its war of words over Greenland as President Trump seeks to acquire the island nation despite Denmark’s pushback.

And let's not forget that other bonus ...

The meretricious Magnay wrapped up proceedings ...

One school of thought there is that having a strong US presence in Greenland could provide an important buffer to aggressive Russian exploitation of the Arctic region – but only if it is by negotiation, not a takeover.
This could encourage NATO chief, Mark Rutte to cosy up even more with Mr Trump – having already called him the “big Daddy” – and encourage other European nations to look the other way if the US makes its Arctic moves, by citing such security issues.
This week’s declaration by the seven European leaders on Greenland attempts a diplomatic meandering, as they point out Arctic security is a priority and that they are “stepping up” to keep the Arctic safe and deter adversaries.
President Trump may yet offer big dollars for access to Greenland’s rare earth minerals and oil and gas, even if the country is not for sale, having shown an alternative: the US military might in Venezuela last week. All the while, Europe’s confidence in the US as a reliable ally has taken another earth-shattering hit.

Splendid stuff. All good.

Bismarck would have been enormously proud - The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood - and so would Herr "lebensraum" Hitler - only an adequately large space on this earth assures a nation freedom of existence - and Machiavelli might have applauded ... after all, the ends always justifies the means, and never mind the road kill along the way ...

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.

Go at it, King Donald, go at it hard, and likely you will have Our Henry's and the reptiles' blessings ...

What a pity that all that's left is idle dreaming ...