In which Polonius pants over the beefy boofhead while he humps away, and the dog botherer does climate science denialism for the umpteenth time ...

 

The pond was pleased, neigh delighted, when later in the weekend, the reptiles put Tamworth's ineradicable, eternal shame at the top of the digital edition...

It shows that the reptiles are being diligent in their attempts to demonise Barners and his red-headed tyrannical shrewish consort ...

The pond has already been there and done that under a different header, and like everything else in the hive mind, it turned to digital fish and chip wrappings in a nanosecond, but it shows that Barners, and so Tamworth, will keep on battling to stay centre of the known universe ...

While taking that snapshot, the pond was reminded to again feature that intermittent archive link to the Angelic one ... and because the pond is always keen to give as many reptiles as possible a chance to bask in the Tamworth sun ...

ROYAL FAMILY
Rat-infested future if eighth in line to throne does time
If Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is convicted and jailed he’ll discover the brutal and squalid reality of prison life.
By Christine Middap
Associate editor, chief writer

Regrettably the reptiles dropped the "rat-infested" note from the actual story header ... 

Even worse the reptiles couldn't find a place for that snap, which the Graudian had already turned into a fetching piece of Royal mug merch ...

Credit where credit is due... the middling Middap managed to do her entire piece without a single mention of King Donald and his many appearances in the Trumpstein files, nor did she for a nanosecond wonder why the former prince scored an arrest while King Donald and his assorted nutlickers (and Lutnicks) roam wild and free ...

Still, it's always a treat to see that the monarchist hive mind FAFO'd and now have columns to write.

And so to another diligent worker in the reptile hive mind, diligently beavering away in the coal mine to make the world safe for the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ...

The header: Angus Taylor stacks the frontbench with rivals — and bets on unity over fear; The new Liberal leader has elevated allies and competitors alike, signalling confidence rather than caution. After dire polling and internal turmoil, Angus Taylor is wagering that strength beats factional score-settling.

The caption for the happy family snap: Angus Taylor unveiled a shadow ministry that includes key internal rivals as well as loyalists. Picture: Glenn Hampson

In an alternative world, outside the hive mind, the illustrative snap might have shown the beefy prime Angus boofhead from down Goulburn way consorting with his "key internal rivals"...

... but of course the point of this is that Polonius is a member of the outer rings of La Famiglia and so has no interest in Mafia snaps, so a snap of the smaller nuclear La Famiglia is much more fitting.

Polonius did his best to put a gloss on all this ...

It is a legend, possibly a true one, that right-wing Labor Party politician Fred Daly introduced a newly elected colleague to the harsh reality of democratic politics. When the newcomer visited the House of Representatives for the first time, he pointed to the Liberal Party benches and said, “That’s where our political opponents sit.”
To which Daly is said to have replied: “No, son; our political opponents sit among us.” Meaning that to get to the top of the tree in democratic politics, a politician has to prevail over their colleagues.
It would seem that newly elected Liberal leader Angus Taylor does not follow the teachings of Daly. What’s surprising about his frontbench announcement last Tuesday is that it contains all of his political rivals who might aspire to be Liberal Party leader someday.
Look at it this way: Taylor defeated Sussan Ley in the partyroom ballot by a significant margin, 34 votes to 17. Senator Jane Hume prevailed as deputy leader over Ted O’Brien, 30 votes to 20. She was elected on the back of the 11 votes that Dan Tehan won on the second ballot. Melissa Price was eliminated on the first ballot with two votes. As a senator, Hume is unlikely to become Liberal leader.
Tehan (who voted for Taylor in the leadership ballot) has significant support within the Liberal Party. He has retained his important position as opposition energy and emissions reduction spokesman. Tehan also was appointed to a significant role as manager of opposition business in the House of Representatives – a position held by Anthony Albanese before he became Labor Prime Minister.
Another potential rival of Taylor is Andrew Hastie. Taylor gave him responsibility for industry and sovereign capability, a key economic position. Hastie also was appointed deputy leader of the opposition in the house.
Tim Wilson is another potential rival to Taylor. He was appointed Treasury spokesman, the second most important position in opposition. Wilson presents as a moderate rather than a conservative in the Liberal Party ranks. He voted for Ley. Moreover Taylor, a conservative, accommodated O’Brien who polled second to Hume along with the best performing moderates (and Ley supporters) in his shadow ministry. Namely (in alphabetical order) Andrew Bragg and Wilson. In other words, there was no purge of moderates.

At this point, the pond could only marvel. 

Why it's one gigantic happy family, the beefy boofhead's happy nuclear family enlarged to the whole universe.

Polonius was in such a state of rapture that he'd completely forgotten to mention there was not a single conservative at the ABC.

Would this mystifying, meaningless interruption remind him of his sacred duty?

Of course not ...

As I wrote in these pages on October 18 last year, on becoming leader after the Coalition’s disastrous defeat in the May 2025 election, Ley erred in not appointing some of the party’s best performers to her frontbench. They included (in alphabetical order) Claire Chandler, Sarah Henderson and Hume. Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price did not get significant positions. Hastie resigned from the shadow ministry and Nampijinpa Price was dropped. All are on Taylor’s frontbench.
When the above are added to the likes of Michaelia Cash, Jonno Duniam and James Paterson, the opposition has the strongest frontbench available. Those Ley supporters whom Taylor demoted were not strong public performers.
Then there is the leader. Taylor seems to be speaking more directly than previously and has started to deliver a simple but coherent political message. Which does not mean the Coalition (the Nationals’ frontbench is chosen by David Littleproud) is close to government. But it is showing signs of taking the political fight up to Albanese and his colleagues.
Four conservative leaders have come back from partyroom defeats to lead their party: Robert Menzies, Andrew Peacock, John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull. Peacock stepped down after losing the 1987 election and Turnbull was replaced as leader a few years after losing 14 seats to Labor at the 2016 election.
Menzies and Howard learnt from the errors they made the first time around, particularly with respect to their handling of colleagues. They went on to become, respectively, the longest and second longest serving Australian prime ministers in their second term as party leader.
It’s early days yet. But according to the report by Sarah Ison and Greg Brown in The Weekend Australian last Saturday, Taylor has learnt from his mistakes when dealing with colleagues as Treasury spokesman during Peter Dutton’s leadership. Competent politicians learn from failure as well as success.

Polonius spends his time absorbing the hive mind? What's new?

But then the dastardly ABC did attempt to ruin things, by daring to interview the savvy Savva...

Some ABC and Nine journalists have run the line that the Liberals will suffer politically from removing their first female leader, overlooking that Labor brought down Julia Gillard, its first female leader.
Political commentator Niki Savva is no fan of the contemporary Liberal Party or Taylor. However, when interviewed by Sally Sara on ABC Radio National Breakfast on the morning of the partyroom ballot, Savva said: “I know people, particularly moderate Liberal women, are distressed by the … impending loss of the first female leader. But no man would survive these poll numbers … and every politician, male or female, lives or dies by the polls.”

Ah, all good, full steam ahead, victory is assured ...

There was a collapse in the Coalition vote after Christmas. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation had been creeping up in opinion polls throughout 2025 and was polling in the high teens by late 2025. A Newspoll conducted on November 17-20 had One Nation at 15 per cent to the Coalition’s 24 per cent.
The first Newspoll after the Bondi massacre of December 14 was conducted on January 12-15. It had One Nation on 22 per cent to the Coalition’s 21 per cent. The Newspoll conducted on February 5-8 had One Nation at 27 per cent to the Coalition’s 18 per cent. No Liberal leader could survive this.
This suggests that Australian politics has changed, to some extent at least, following the massacre. For whatever reason, support on the non-left side of politics moved from the Liberal Party to One Nation. Current polling indicates this move has been reversed under Taylor’s leadership.
Whatever critics of Taylor may say with respect to the female vote, women in the party have never held such senior positions as in the current shadow ministry. This is another indication that the new leader wants the best performers on his frontbench and is not worried about internal competition.

Uh huh. The lettuce will wait and see ... because there's plenty of room for snark ...

And speaking of migrants, as the reptiles will likely be doing at nauseating length over the coming months ...

Tony Wright, in that other place, and so in the intermittent archive, took to wondering how it might all play out ...

When Angus Taylor delivered his first speech to parliament in December 2013, he devoted part of it to the memory of Sir William Hudson.
Unsurprising, really. Hudson remains a giant of 20th century Australian history.
He was credited with building Australia’s single greatest infrastructure project, the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, of which he was commissioner and chief engineer from its inception in 1949 until 1967.
He was also Taylor's grandfather.
“My grandfather, William Hudson, was, and remains, a pervasive role model in my life,” Taylor, the newly minted parliamentarian, told the House of Representatives.
“He conceived of the idea [the Snowy Mountains scheme] and insisted, against resistance, to bring in large numbers of refugees from war-torn Europe.
“He insisted that people from over 30 countries, who had just been fighting each other in the Second World War, live and work together in multi-ethnic camps.
“The Snowy scheme, quite literally, changed the face of our nation.”
These years later, Taylor is the new leader of a federal Coalition gasping for relevance as disaffected voters fall for the easy, right-wing populism of Pauline Hanson and her followers.
Taylor has flagged his priority is to take a hardline stance on immigration, including supporting measures to block or expel people “who hate our way of life”.
Sussan Ley left him to mull over an as-yet untried scheme to ban arrivals from certain troubled areas of the world, including countries in Africa and the Middle East, and, for pity’s sake, Gaza. Oh, and border control would have the Trumpist power to check the mobile phones of arrivals.
Precisely what cuts to Australia’s immigration numbers Taylor might deem suitable, or whether he might ban applicants from specific countries, is yet to be revealed.
More intriguingly, perhaps, is the open question of how Taylor might square his reverence for his grandfather’s life’s work with his determination to exploit a rise in anti-immigration sentiment for his and his party’s political survival.
Grandfather Bill Hudson’s Australia in 1949 was, of course, a different place to the nation we inhabit now.
World War II had shaken Australians’ belief in their nation’s security.
“Populate or perish” was the cry of a country of fewer than 8 million.
The vast majority of Australians – about 90 per cent – were of Anglo-Celtic heritage, and the White Australia Policy was an article of faith.
The Australian census of 1947 identified just 38,653 Australians as “foreign” (the census papers also declared all numbers were “exclusive of full-blood Aboriginals”).
Xenophobia, like institutionalised racism, ran deep.
When Ben Chifley’s Labor government first decided to broaden Australia’s intake of postwar immigrants to include Europeans in the cause of the “populate or perish” policy, immigration agents took ham-fisted care to assuage public unease about “foreigners”.
They carefully chose light-skinned, often blond, men and women, most of them from the Baltic nations: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
It worked: journalists witnessing the first immigrants travelling by train from Port Melbourne to the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre near Albury-Wodonga enthusiastically called them “the beautiful Balts”.
Still, wharfies at Port Melbourne in late 1947 were reluctant to dock the first ship carrying these new arrivals, claiming they would “take Australian jobs”.
When Hudson was appointed in 1949 by the Chifley government to build the massive Snowy scheme – to divert water from the mountains to irrigate the nation’s food bowl and produce reliable hydroelectric power – he knew there were nowhere near enough Australians capable or willing to tackle the work.
He chose to upend Australia’s monoculture.
Hudson settled for the bulk of his workforce on the great pool of Europeans whose lives were shattered by World War II.
Displaced persons’ camps overflowed with refugees. Poverty and hopelessness had its grip on villages, smashed cities and ruined agricultural regions across the continent.
Many of the people Hudson and his people persuaded to take their chances in far-off Australia had also been at each other’s throats during the war, and sometimes long before.
Germany, having invaded Poland, waged war everywhere; Italians were drafted into Mussolini’s fascist fever until they turned on him and killed him; Greece was occupied by Italians, Germans, Bulgarians and Hungarians; ancient hatreds divided Serbs and Croats. After the war, Stalin’s Soviet empire swallowed the countries of eastern Europe, leading to a frantic exodus.
Hudson’s scheme employed people – almost all of them men – from 33 of these broken nations.
Few spoke English or even shared languages with their former European neighbours.
There could easily have been a backlash from everyday Australians and hysteria over importing enemy aliens that would make One Nation’s stance today look tame.
But Hudson had an ace up his sleeve.
He had the full support of Australia’s political leaders from both sides of the fence: Chifley initially, and the Liberals’ Bob Menzies through the 1950s and ’60s.
They lauded immigration and the Snowy scheme as nation-building, and a potentially sceptical public went along with it.
The likes of Pauline Hanson wouldn’t have got a word in edgeways.
Now, Hudson’s grandson has a choice.
He could choose to embrace a non-discriminatory immigration policy while promoting a perfectly legitimate and overdue debate about how many immigrants Australia should welcome.
He could temper the wilder fears promoted by cynical populists by pointing to nation-builders like rural doctors from the Middle East, aged care workers from Asia, technologists from the subcontinent and the army of recent arrivals who undertake unheralded and often unpleasant tasks in the cause of building a future for their kids.
Or he could buckle to those in his party who are terrified of the racists and xenophobes intent on exploiting the concerns of everyday Australians who are abandoning mainstream political parties because they feel leaders aren’t speaking to them any more.
And, of course, he could muse about what the pervasive role model of his life, grandfather Hudson, might have advised.

The pond already knows the answer, courtesy Golding ...

And so reluctantly to the dog botherer ...

The header: Harbour no illusions: Coalition should ditch the climate groupthink; Harbourside mansion owners don’t fret over power bills. A wealthy Liberal supporter’s climate advice from her Point Piper mansion exposes the problem. Evangelism won’t win wealthy voters; a potent energy case may.

The caption for the snob-bashing snap: The view of Sydney Harbour from harboursdie Potts Point. Picture: Supplied

The pond was reluctant because as soon as you read the word "groupthink", you know the dog botherer is on his usual projection path, what with him being a certified member of the hive mind climate science denialist groupthink cult ...

The dog botherer wants you to know he's not one of them ...

A week or so ago I happened to be sipping on a drink at a harbourside mansion, just a few moorings down from Malcolm Turnbull’s Point Piper pile as it turns out. When the conversation turned to politics, a wealthy and successful woman who is a friend and supporter of Turnbull shared what she believed was a critical insight into the Liberal Party’s dilemma.
She said her adult, professional daughter would not vote for the Liberals until they were doing more to tackle climate change. The implication, in fact the assertion, was that the Coalition needed to dramatically increase its commitment to greenhouse gas emission reductions to win back right-leaning people, especially in the younger cohorts.
This is a common argument, often put by political pundits on the ABC and in Nine newspapers as well as by members of the Liberals’ so-called moderate faction and, indeed, by former prime minister Turnbull himself.
It is often portrayed as a binary choice – the party is stuck with a choice between promising climate action to win back the teal seats or rejecting action in favour of cheaper electricity to win regional and outer suburban seats.
Here I was in the middle of teal territory, surrounded by the nation’s most expensive real estate and many of its richest people, and I was being offered a political reality check.
I do not doubt the sincerity or good intentions of these Liberal barrackers, but their logic is warped. Instead of telling the Liberals to change their policies, this woman needed to tell her daughter to wise up.
No one with a harbourside mansion frets over their electricity bills, they don’t even fret over the salaries they pay to the people they employ to take care of daily mundanities such as power bills.
This is a classic demonstration of the post-material concerns that can influence the voting patterns of the wealthy. The accepted wisdom of many in the political class is that the Coalition parties must indulge the post-material concerns of people who want to save the planet if they are to attract their votes and win back seats such as Wentworth (in which we were drinking), Kooyong, Warringah, Mackellar, North Sydney and Curtin.

Just to emphasise the point, the reptiles flung in a snap of Malware's shack, Malcolm Turnbull's Point Piper pile. Picture: Supplied

The pond has no time for Malware, destroyer on onion muncher instructions of the NBN, but what's with the dog botherer, at one time fellow traveling with him as a minder minion up to his neck in Utegate?

The pond knows for a fact that he's a latte-sipper in his own home, posing with mug and poncy read...

And he too fell for the emerald city, shameless in its floozy charms...

Chris Kenny: My two homes — Adelaide and Sydney — and why I love them

For years there was this horrible sense of being unfaithful.
Falling for an overwhelming beauty, enticed on each encounter by a sparkling sense of excitement, I had to constantly remind myself of that more subtle loveliness back home.
For a long while — as you do — I remained loyal.
Then it happened, and life hasn’t been quite the same since.
We were flying into Sydney late one afternoon on the approach from the north, where the flight path takes you over Cockatoo Island and you look east to see the setting sun reflecting in the towering glass of the city, the grand bridge arching over glistening water, the stark curves of the Opera House and ferries chopping up the harbour as they cut their way out to towards the heads in the fading light.
I’ve seen more than a few cities but this one always takes your breath away.
What was different this time was how, for the first time, the dazzling beauty was overwhelmed by another sense, a stronger and more comforting feeling.
It was a feeling that, until that day, I had only ever known when arriving in Adelaide.
My shoulders relaxed, I let out a sigh and just felt comforted in the knowledge that I was home. Sydney had become home.
From that moment on, there was no point in feeling as though I was unfaithful to Adelaide.
It’s what happens when you build a life in a new city — buy a house, forge a career, make friends and expand your family.
By that time I was even on first-name terms with the butcher and drycleaner — of course, Sydney was home.

What a shameless philanderer, what a wretched adulterer, ready to abandon the great aunts on the verandah for life with an emerald-glittering harlot ...

But the pond digresses ... and there's the usual climate science denialist work to be done ...

On the contrary, this is a recipe for surrendering core right-of-centre values that should prioritise sensible policies and sound economic management over political posturing. The Liberal Party should never acquiesce to people who want it to espouse economically harmful policies that will do nothing to improve the climate just so they can feel better about their voting choices.
What the Coalition should do is advocate, explain and convince voters about the environmental futility and economic harm of the climate policies imposed by the current Labor-Greens nexus. It should have faith that successful professionals will be as capable as working families when it comes to assessing what is logical and beneficial for the economy and the environment.
Frankly, it is embarrassing that any educated professional would seriously propose that emissions reductions in Australia could alter the global climate or that a modern industrialised economy could run on a renewables-plus-storage model.
Just because this stuff is repeated ad nauseam by green-left politicians, media and activists does not make it believable; at some stage intelligent voters must consider the facts.
And this is where the right-of-centre has let people down in public debate. Driven by political popularity it has flirted with net zero and renewables, allowed a functional national electricity grid to be largely demolished in favour of a renewables build-out that makes power prohibitively expensive and precariously unreliable. At the same time, some elements on the right have pushed a resurgence of coal-fired power, denied the climate science, turned to gas and promoted publicly funded nuclear energy.
Slow-motion disaster
In short, the right-of-centre parties have been divided and confused on climate and energy policy. While they have run around in circles on this stuff, their traditional constituencies of suburban and regional families and small businesses have been crushed by soaring electricity bills. Manufacturing has been decimated, moving offshore, and heavy industry increasingly is kept alive only by government energy subsidies.
It is a slow-motion, long-running policy disaster. The Liberals have seen too many of their well-heeled supporter in teal seats drift to candidates who reflect their self-identity – women of their community who care for the environment, hate major party politics and perhaps consider themselves just a little superior to the huddled masses of the mortgage belt.
Those who suggest the Liberals must find salvation by appealing to this political trickery are promoting political suicide.
The clear distinction between the political right and the political left is the rejection of ideology and fashion by the right in favour of practical ideas that deliver economic and social benefits. If they chase the left down the path of climate evangelism and virtue signalling the Liberals can only make a mockery of themselves.
The Coalition needs to argue the facts, cogently and consistently, for an extended period. In 30 years of climate and energy policy they have never managed to do that.
The Nationals and Liberals need to ensure they are not distracted by members dismissing concerns about global warming or denying the need for constant scientific research and assessment. By the same token, they must expose climate alarmism rather than endorse it.
There are three central points that must be sheeted home to everyone in the country and they are all buttressed by an army of facts. First, cheap, reliable energy is the essential lifeblood of our entire economy and civilisation, and it is being undercut by the push to renewable energy.
Second, whatever Australia does cannot have any discernible impact on the global climate, so that to the extent that policy decisions can alter the climate, we will get the climate the world deigns to give us.

It goes without saying that the reptiles flung in yet another terrifying snap of those infernal machines that litter the Hume highway down beefy boofhead Gouburn way with dead whales, There are rising regional concerns about wind projects. Picture: AFP

The pond likes it because there's a chance to run a balancing 'toon ...

And there's also a chance to reference other yarns in the area.

Perhaps out of shame or guilt, or simple Hollywood-style hysteria, WaPo has taken to running shock horror climate stories...

That's just a titillating teaser. If you haven't seen that movie, there's more at the intermittent archive ...

Instead the pond had to be content with some more bog standard denialism ...

Third, there are smarter ways to reduce carbon emissions without undercutting our energy grid or alienating vast areas of countryside, bushland and coastline with renewables and transmission projects.
These arguments need to be made relentlessly, leveraging daily controversies about rising electricity costs, increasing cases of load-shedding and blackouts, and regional concerns about solar, wind and transmission projects. The energy debate feeds strongly into the pivotal cost-of-living debate because power prices impact household and business costs, directly and indirectly.
Obviously, the Coalition needs to detail an alternative strategy. This needs to recognise there is no rush to meet targets.
We can afford to extend coal-fired generation and use more gas while we bed down the existing renewable assets and switch to nuclear for fixed, baseload, emissions-free energy. Nuclear is the irresistible mainstay of a low-emissions grid, as most of the developed world has recognised.
If Australia is to be a modern economy, running nuclear-powered submarines and hosting AI data centres, then a domestic nuclear industry is inevitable. Every day of delay is a day wasted, and private investment can be leveraged for this task, as is happening in the US, Europe and North Asia.

Why do they want to nuke the country to save the planet, when the planet doesn't need saving, and in any case what could Australia do to help?

Okay, the pond isn't responsible for the weird illogicality of hive mind types of the dog bothering kind, and nor is the pond responsible for the way that, as sure as terrifying windmills must feature, even more terrifying solar farms must follow in a 'fry them to a crisp' way ... Solar farms pictured in Glenrowan, Victoria, next to the Hume Freeway. Picture: Aaron Francis / The Australian

So there's another chance to run a cartoon ...

And that's a chance to catch up with the latest Graudian moan, The heat suffocates, the fires rage - even by brutal Australian standards, this summer is brutal ...(sent to the intermittent archive because of email extortion threats) (it's not because the pond couldn't use a fake email address, it's not because the archive is remotely reliable, it's the bloody principle of the thing).

Inter alia ...

And there's also The New Yorker...with Bill McKibben reminding readers how King Donald was determined to do for the planet just what the dog botherer was proposing ... The E.P.A. Rescinds a Landmark Finding (*archive link):

And then, as likely the Sydney-infatuated dog botherer hadn't caught up with the news of SA's algal bloom disaster, it was a doodle to finish off this tepid repetition of snowflake reptile whines ...

That reclaiming our natural advantage of cheap, reliable energy is good for the economy and our national security is indisputable. But there will also be political benefits.
Nobody doubts the electoral popularity of better and cheaper energy policy in the suburbs and regions. But how to convince those wealthy voters in the teal seats with their post-material concerns?
The first thing to remember is that you don’t need to convince all of them; winning back one in four teal voters will be plenty for the Liberals to reclaim those seats. Most teal voters are green-left types who have drifted from Labor or the Greens (which now tend to run dead in those seats to assist teal victories).
Analysis this week by former ABC election analyst Antony Green shows the starkness of the leftist trend. In Kooyong 83 per cent of the people who voted for Monique Ryan sent their preferences to the Labor Party; for Zoe Daniel in Goldstein it was 80 per cent; and even for Allegra Spender in Wentworth it was 74 per cent. The teals are not centrist. Their preference flows to Labor are almost as strong as Labor gets from the Greens.
Sure, some voters switched from the Liberals to the teals. But this happened even when the Liberals took net zero by 2050 to the last two elections.
Climate posturing has not helped the Liberals in the past, so why would it work now? More to the point, voters need to be presented with a policy alternative.
The Coalition should try to convince voters with logic rather than emotion. After all, if the climate poseurs of Point Piper really believed their alarmism, there would be fire sales of their waterfront properties as they head for the hills.

The hive mind heat is going to be on in relation to migrants and climate science, and the beefy boofhead down Goulburn way is going to wilt in the sun, as sure as a drunk Barners can trip over a planter box, but still manage to stay on the phone ...

And so to a novelty item, courtesy The Atlantic, because it's not just SBS that starts frothing and foaming at the thought of a Nazi angle ... Hitler's Greenland Obsession ...(*archive li nk)

And so on, and credit for writer Timothy W. Ryback for not making the King Donald connection explicit ...just hinting by way of contrast ...

...The Americans, like the British, recognized the distinction between a fascist takeover by force and the prerogatives of a democratically elected government. So just as de Gaulle was recognized as the legitimate representative of France, Kauffman was recognized as the legitimate representative of Denmark and Greenland. Over the next four years, Greenland became a vital transit point for the Allies—it had as many as 17 military facilities, including airfields and naval installations that protected the cryolite-mining operation at Ivittuut—and assisted in the liberation of hundreds of millions of Europeans across the continent. When the war was over and the democratically elected government in Denmark was restored, it willingly reaffirmed this American protection in the 1951 Defense of Greenland agreement, which remains in effect today.

Speaking of Nazis, as the pond often does ...

Tesla slashes Cybertruck prices as it tries to move (unpainted) metal

... Appealing to neither traditional pickup truck buyers, who have largely rejected going to electric vehicles, nor the majority of EV enthusiasts even before Musk’s politics further soured things, fewer than 39,000 Cybertrucks were sold in 2024, and just over 20,000 found homes in 2025. The Edsel might be Ford’s most famous failure, but even it posted superior sales numbers during its relatively brief life.

There's no escaping King Donald, Uncle Elon or AI ...

And speaking of AI ...