In which Our Henry is again sent to the archive, with Penbo, Killer of the IPA and the onion muncher filling the void with more void ...

 

It was inevitable that the fate of the former prince now known as randy Andy would preoccupy the reptiles early this morning, with much navel gazing.

What struck the pond isn't so much the way that the Trumpenstein files have roiled the Poms as the way that King Donald and his deeply corrupt band of courtiers have merrily rolled along.

The reptiles do love a Royal scandal, what with King Donald just being a poseur, low rent, naff monarch ...

Typical of the reptile coverage was cackling Claire's celebration, The lonely courage of a woman who brought down the Establishment, which, in heroic Jack the Insider style, managed to make not a single mention of King Donald or his merry band of Nutlicks - and no matter all the fuss about Giuffre working at the King's Mar-a-Lago spa.

Luckily, as an unrepentant republican, the pond can duck and weave around all the reptile hysteria. 

That the House of Windsor is depraved is hardly news for those who remember the good old days of that unrepentant Nazi, the Duke of Windsor, dodging out of being King Edward VIII for a bit of American divorcee crumpet.

Instead the pond's tour of duty on a Friday takes in Our Henry, but there's a problem.

Each week of late there's a tendency for Our Henry to go full, blaring Zionist, and so it is this day.

A taster shows him at work:

That's more than enough already, especially with that wretched uncredited collage setting the tone at the get go ...

The pond usually resolves to send the hole in bucket man off to the intermittent archive, limiting itself to recording the moments when the pompous hole in bucket man swallowed an encyclopaedia of classical and philosophical references ...

This week's outing was very low key, but included ...

As the great German intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck observed, “historically prototyped” words are natural Kampfbegriffe (battle-concepts), readily wielded not for dispassionate description but for combat.

And ...

Nothing more starkly illustrates this dynamic than the increasingly widespread use of the term “Zio”. Its rise directly reflects the constraints under which the hatred operates, specifically the fact that its target – Jews as Jews — cannot be openly identified without social cost. As with Harry Potter’s Voldemort – an embodiment of absolute evil who can be referred to only as “He Who Shall Not Be Named” – the word itself becomes unsayable.

Say what? Harry Potter? 

While some might think this lowers Our Henry's tone, surely it proves that the great polymath is comfortable with the highest of high culture, and the lowest of the low ...and so can always Sauron on to new trans-loathing highs.

And that's why Our Henry can show roam from potted Potter to showing his Orwellian chops...

That it comes in the throes of demonstrations eerily recalling the “Two Minutes Hate” sessions in George Orwell’s 1984, where “a hideous ecstasy of vindictiveness, a desire to kill, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current”, only raises that menace to even greater heights.

But limiting Our Henry to this sort of smug display of his superior, neigh Nietzschean, embrace of a master intellectual morality leaves the pond struggling to fill up the space.

Cue some counter-programming.

If you'd said the pond would be quoting Thomas L. Friedman in the NY Times, the pond likely would have sued you for defamation, but here we are ... Netanyahu Plays Trump and American Jews for Fools — Again (*archive link)

That's just a taster. In his usual way, Friedman goes on and on and on, but it's all there at the intermittent archive.

Amongst the many links in the Friedman piece, there was a reference to a relatively recent pond favourite in Haaretz, by Ehud Olmert, living PM level proof that referencing ethnic cleansing isn't being anti-Semitic  ... A Settler Drive to Ethnically Cleanse Palestinians Is Underway in the West Bank. Israel's Security Apparatus Is Complicit (*archive link)

Again it's just a taster, though anyone who goes the full hog can experience the weird sight of Olmert proposing there were no discernible war crimes in Gaza, while calling out the West Bank's assorted war crimes and unfolding ethnic cleansing.

As a result of these distractions, the pond also consigned Vic Alhadeff's Jewish Australians no longer feel safe in this country to the intermittent archive.

The best Vic could manage was decidedly middle-brow, the sort of reference you might pick up from an ancient school reading list:

In Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Atticus Finch says: “You never really understand a person until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.” In other words, understanding that when Jewish Australians call out the surge of antisemitism, it stems from generations of historical trauma and learned experience.

Give the pond a call Vic, when you've come to an understanding of ethnic cleansing, stemming from generations of historical trauma and learned experience, and please, in the meantime, do your best to emulate Our Henry and read some Potter.

And with that clearing of the decks, the pond could turn to other Friday pleasures ...

First up was croweater Penbo, foreseeing doom and gloom in the state with a deep fear and loathing of eastern staters...

Penbo could be swallowed in just two chunks ...

Does this mean that the Adelaide Writers' Festival can go on to more glorious episodes? Seems so ...

Of course the pond only takes an interest of the thoughts of the great aunts still stuck on the verandah as a way of pandering to the regions ... suffice to say, it all felt eerily familiar ...

Take it away Penbo ... celebrate cancel culture in the land of the crows ...

And so to Killer of the IPA, and the pond wanted to use Killer to make a couple of observations about the new form of reptile representation.

Firstly the reptiles have taken to putting the author's name at the very top of the piece, for no apparent reason, except that it's change and this sort of window dressing must be good.

And immediately down below the uncredited wretched collage, which likely should be blamed on AI, there's now a new space for the comments and for Google ...

This means you could just click on the comments and not even bother reading Killer of the IPA, which must be a win-win for the hive mind.

Killer can't be blamed for having 0 comments at time of writing - the pond is sure devoted members of the hive mind will join in his bizarre celebration of freedumb boy.

What's revealing is the desperate new desire by the reptiles for engagement via Google.

Didn't anyone tell them that with a strict paywall, there's no point having the lizard Oz as a preferred source on Google unless you're a paid up member of the hive mind?

So Google is going to drive recruitment for the hive mind?

Too tragic ...

And so to the rest, in copy and paste form ...

And yes you can begin a sentence with "and", and especially when Killernomics is your game ...

And as Sydney University economist Christian Gillitzer recently pointed out, the top rate is a driving force behind the nation’s infatuation with negatively geared property, as high earners rationally flock to what is practically the only tax strategy left to reduce their taxable income.
The top rate also snuffs out opportunities for foreign investment, as big multinationals learn what their highly skilled staff would face if they relocated.
When I lived in Washington DC, Americans were shocked when I explained that not only was our top marginal income tax rate 47 per cent but it applied for every dollar above $US125,000 ($177,280) a year. A similar earner in high-tax DC faces around 34 per cent marginal rate, and only 24 per cent in zero state income tax Florida and Texas. The top US federal income tax rate of 37 per cent doesn’t apply until income reaches $US609,000.
As a measure of redistribution it’s a fool’s errand. “Many of the wealthy don’t pay the top rate, it’s actually mainly the wage earners who can’t manage their tax affairs to reduce their taxable income,” Robert Breunig, an economist at ANU, tells me.
And it doesn’t even raise much money. “If you cut the top rate you’d actually raise more tax from around 15 per cent of taxpayers who are currently on the top rate on our estimates,” Breunig adds.
One of many empirical examples; the British Labour government increased its top income tax rate on capital gains to 24 per cent in 2024, only to see receipts tumble more than 20 per cent.
The federal government will attack Wilson’s suggestion as “looking after the big end of town”. If it is, the town is now an entire city. The number of top-rate taxpayers has exploded from fewer than 300,000 in 2008, when the top rate first settled at $180,000, to around a million last financial year. And inflation near 4 per cent is pushing tens of thousands of additional taxpayers into the top bracket every year. If the top threshold had been indexed to inflation since 2008 – a dignity many Western governments afford their voters – it would sit around $280,000 today.
The government will trot out the tired claim that Australia’s top rate is reasonable by OECD standards, which tendentiously includes numerous economically sclerotic European nations in the list that should, economically, be treated as one. That same list of nations also reveals the federal government’s reliance on income tax is, alongside Denmark, the highest in the world.
In the Asia-Pacific region, which matters to us, Australia’s top rate is the highest, embarrassingly even besting supposedly communist China’s 45 per cent. New Zealand has a top rate of 39 per cent and doesn’t even tax capital gains.

Excellent stuff, and we're likely to see many more tales of woe and talk of the suffering of the filthy rich, and the urgent need to follow the disunited states down the rabbit hole of profound economic inequity ...

Don't just trust the pond, read Forbes' Income Inequality Is Surging In the U.S., Oxfam Report Shows...

Very tasty, as the reptiles interrupted Killer of the IPA with an AV distraction ...

Chalmers ‘in denial’ as ex- RBA boss criticises Labor’s inaction on boosting the economy
Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson discusses former Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe...
more

The pond confesses it didn't have the first clue who this Laura was, but she did the right thing by featuring Freedumb Boy and that Lowe aiming low ...

It set Killer off on a final gobbet of Freedumb rapture ...

Loosening the income tax noose doesn’t require lifting the GST, among the most annoying refrains in Australian public debate. Cutting federal government expenditure, the fastest growth since the 1970s outside the pandemic, offers plenty of scope to entirely “pay for” income tax cuts, including streamlining the out-of-control NDIS, which Wilson admirably noted.
IPA research last year found emissions reductions-related programs were chewing up at least $9bn a year, alone enough to fund sizeable cuts to the top rate, and surely a ripe political target for a Coalition that has recently disavowed “net zero”.
The traditional definition of recession – back-to-back quarters of declining GDP – isn’t relevant in a nation that annually floods its labour market with hundreds of thousands of new workers. GDP per capita has shrunk in 10 of the past 13 quarters: this is a severe recession already, on the measure that actually matters.
Revelations this week that real wages have fallen “for the first time in two years” hide the true extent of the decline. The CPI doesn’t include the cost of bracket creep, home loan interest rates or even the price of dwellings.
If the government wants to improve living standards and encourage more productive investments, the most obvious lever it has is trimming the top rate of income tax.
Not many Liberals have had the guts to start a fight over the top marginal tax rate. Wilson has admirably helped defeat proposals to increase tax on super and dividends; his arguments to cut income tax are even stronger.

Meanwhile, the poor lad has already begun to learn walking backwards... (here's an intermittent archive link as a way of avoiding the Graudian's campaign for email addresses with menaces):

There's going to be great fun in the next few months ...

And so to a final note. The pond wanted to draw attention to this outing by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic ...

No, It’s Not Back to Business as Usual
Marco Rubio was more civil than J. D. Vance had been, but the message to longtime allies was the same.

That link should work as a share, let the pond know if it doesn't, because this is only a taster ...

Just like last year, I watched the most important American speech at the Munich Security Conference in the overflow room, sitting on the floor, underneath the speakers. This is the best place both to hear the speech (otherwise the room is too noisy) and to watch the faces of people gathered around the screens. The prime ministers and presidents sit in the main hall, but plenty of other people attend the conference: security analysts, lieutenant colonels, drone engineers, deputy defense ministers, legislators, and hundreds of other people whose professional lives are dedicated to ending the war in Ukraine, bringing peace to Europe, and projecting security in the world.
Just like last year, this group was hoping to hear how the U.S. administration is planning to contribute to these projects. And, just like last year, audience members were disappointed.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Saturday’s key speaker, was more civil than Vice President J. D. Vance, who in 2025 attacked and insulted many of the European governments represented in the room. But Rubio’s speech had many of the same goals. He did not mention the war, or imply that America would help Europe win it. He did not express the belief that Russia can be defeated. He did not refer to the democratic values and the shared belief in freedom that once motivated the NATO alliance, and that still motivate its European members. Instead, he offered a vision of unity based on a misty idea of inherited “Western civilization”—Dante, Shakespeare, the Sistine Chapel, the Beatles—which would fight against the real enemies: not Russia, not China, but rather migration, the “climate cult,” and other forms of modern degeneracy.
The speech worked like a Rorschach test. If you wanted to hear some positive news, you might have been satisfied by the emotive expressions of unity. But one of my German friends clearly heard a “dog whistle” to the German far right. I spoke with a couple of Poles who noticed that the list of great men and great artworks failed to include anyone or anything from their half of the European continent. An Indian colleague was alarmed by the praise for colonialism. In Rubio’s repeated references to Christianity, a lot of Americans heard a shout-out to Christian nationalists. And many, many people noticed the oddity of the attack on migration, coming from a son of migrants.
In the hours and days afterward, I did not meet a single person of any nationality who thinks that the American-European relationship is returning to business as usual. Rubio did not say that, and obviously did not want anyone to believe it. Neither did Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, who also appeared in Munich. Colby, speaking at a public event, instead promoted the emergence of a “Europeanized NATO” that can defend itself, by itself, with America perhaps offering a theoretical nuclear umbrella. He dismissed the “cloud-castle abstraction of the rules-based international order.” He said that no one should “base alliances on sentiment alone.” This is the message that the Trump administration has been sending all year, and it has not changed.
That message comes with some profound contradictions. Just after Munich, Rubio flew to Bratislava and Budapest, where he heaped praise upon Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister. President Trump, he told Orbán, is “deeply committed to your success,” a clear reference to upcoming Hungarian elections that Orbán is on course to lose, if the vote is conducted fairly. Many have noted that Orbán has a record of corruption and electoral manipulation, that he puts pressure on judges and independent journalists (hardly any of the latter are left in Hungary), and that Rubio himself signed a letter denouncing the Hungarian prime minister for “democratic erosion” back in 2019.
But in the light of the American message delivered in Munich, the visit was also inconsistent. Orbán, like the far-right leaders in Germany and France who have close ties to Vance and the MAGA establishment, opposes European rearmament. Orbán is not merely seeking to block the emergence of a “Europeanized NATO”; he operates as a de facto spokesperson for Russia inside the European Union.
In practice, Orbán’s Hungary creates a major security headache for everybody else. Russians are waging a horrific, damaging, costly war on Ukraine. They have sent drones into Europe, staged regular cyberattacks, and cut undersea cables in the Baltic Sea. Does the United States really want Europe to unite and fight these threats together? If so, why is the Trump administration supporting someone who opposes this project? Europeans can’t help but wonder if the American goal is rather to encourage a divided Europe that can’t defend itself against anyone...

Stop right there Ms Applebaum. 

All that talk of Orbán’s authoritarian Hungary reminded the pond of a reptile favourite.

Recognise this lickspittle fellow traveller with authoritarians?

The pond doesn't have time to go into all the servile, self-serving pandering and sycophantic Orbán worship indulged in by the onion muncher over the years, and will instead just note Benjamin Clark in Crikey in May last year ...

Tony Abbott’s position in Orbán’s Hungary is untenable

If Tony Abbott is to inherit Liberal Party elder statesman status, he needs to reconsider some of the company he keeps — starting with his affiliation with the Danube Institute.

Inter alia ...

Last year, it was revealed by Hungarian media that BLA has “spent more than half a billion forints [A$2.16 million] of public funds to pay foreign guest lecturers and writers” and that “several guest lecturers were asked to write articles that would positively portray the Orbán government in the United States”. Crikey makes no inference that Abbott has received such payments or that his writing or public statements have been influenced by them. Abbott has registered his Danube Institute role, among other activities, on the Australian government’s foreign influence transparency register.

Even so, Abbott’s position with the institute, and his repeated praise for Orbán, ought to be scrutinised by the Australian media far more often. Morally, any association with such an illiberal, increasingly undemocratic regime is highly suspect. And is it appropriate for him to serve on the Australian War Memorial board, an institution dedicated to celebrating those who fought for democracy and freedom, while simultaneously getting into bed with a state apparatus that increasingly represents the opposite?

Last week, Orbán’s party Fidesz introduced legislation to the Hungarian Parliament that would empower the government to monitor, penalise and ban organisations it designates as a threat to national sovereignty. Critics have suggested that, if passed, the bill could shut down all independent media and politically engaged NGOs in the country. Is this company you really want to keep, Tony?

Abbott’s affiliation is particularly hypocritical given his staunch support for Ukraine. He once threatened to “shirtfront” Vladimir Putin, and while he might have misspoken, no-one questioned his sincerity in repudiating the Russian warmonger’s imperial landgrab. Abbott has recently criticised Donald Trump’s embrace of Russia, accusing the president of living in “fantasy land”, and urged Europe to step up its support to Ukraine.

Yet Orbán is now the key blocker in Europe for doing so. He is holding out against progressing Ukraine’s application to join the European Union, among other roadblocks. Other EU states are now seeking ways to sideline his recalcitrant regime to put further pressure on the Kremlin.

While I was in Budapest, tension over Ukraine’s EU ascension question was palpable. The government is holding a referendum, a frequent tactic of Orbán as he knows his older voting base is more likely to turn out, on whether to continue holding up Ukraine’s application. Fidesz has put up propaganda posters across the city, which are being graffitied by young locals.

This puts the Western conservative coterie that has coalesced around the Danube Institute in an awkward position. Most of them are purportedly pro-Hungary and pro-Ukraine. Murray has called out Joe Rogan for not sticking up for Zelenskyy. O’Sullivan’s X posts suggest he is sceptical of Trump’s “peace” agenda.

But with Orban increasingly running cover for Putin in the EU, how long can they square their circle of affiliations? How can Abbott threaten to “shirtfront” Putin while bear-hugging his new pal Orbán?

Crikey put a series of questions to Abbott, including whether he had received payment or payment in kind for any of his activities with the Danube Institute and/or Hungarian Conservative, whether he had any concerns about Hungary’s role in blocking EU support for Ukraine and, if so, whether this raised any concerns regarding his continued affiliation with the Danube Institute. We did not hear back before deadline.

If respect for democracy, free speech and the rule of law isn’t enough to dissuade them, perhaps a commitment to what remains of Atlanticism and Western security cooperation could. Abbott and his international pals should resign from the Danube Institute on principle, if not in disgrace.

And yet, thanks to all the supplicants in the Murdochian hive mind, the onion muncher keeps on getting away with it.

And so, feeling deeply soiled, and suffused with self-pity with having waded yet again through the reptile sewers, time to wrap up with a few celebrations of Albo's mob ...