In which Our Henry and Killer perform their usual Friday duties ...

 

A little while ago, the bromancer stupidly attempted to use Xian theology to cast the current "excursion" as a just war, when in reality it's a stupid war being conducted by a mad king and his minions.

So the pond was all agog at the prospect of Our Henry giving his own view of war, and what it's good for ...

No time for niceties or a survey of other reptiles in action, it was time to plunge in the deep end:

The header: Strategy of ‘limited war’ undone by limited will; The lesson America drew from Vietnam was when you fight, fight to win. If that lesson is ignored in Iran, the world will become a far more dangerous place.

The caption for the snap foreshadowing a retreat to the past: Two US soldiers guard a street in Saigon during a rash of Vietcong attacks in the Vietnam War. Picture: Getty Images

In a desperate attempt to recover his past form, Our Henry opened with a flourish and and a nod to all that made Prussia great again:

Helmuth von Moltke, the great Prussian strategist who crushed Austria in seven weeks and France in seven months, observed that “no plan of operations survives first contact with the enemy’s main force”.
Should the strikes on Iran end with nothing resolved, the conclusion deserves to be starker still: it is not only the plan that has failed, but the doctrine behind it.
That doctrine – limited war theory – was born in the 1950s. Recoiling from the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction, and from an American approach, forged in World War II, that coupled technological superiority with overwhelming firepower, the think tanks associated with the Pentagon proposed a more calculated alternative: restricted, proportionate force calibrated to political objectives.
Wars were reconceptualised as bargaining exercises.
Adversaries, subjected to “graduated escalation”, would read the signals, weigh the costs, and, once continuing proved costlier than settling, come to the table. Armed force was just coercive diplomacy, each move a carefully pitched message leading to a negotiated outcome.

Of course this retreat meant that Our Henry could romp through the past, and the reptiles could run ancient images of ancient warriors, thereby avoiding the current mad king: President John F. Kennedy embraced the concept amid the Cold War.

Our Henry rambled through 'Nam days:

President John F. Kennedy embraced it, including as the answer to a Cold War increasingly waged in the jungles and shanty towns of the Third World.
But Vietnam exposed the doctrine’s fatal flaw. Having entered the war, Washington placed elaborate restraints on itself – geographic sanctuaries, target immunities, incremental deployments.
Meanwhile, Hanoi fought for total stakes: the unification of Vietnam, by any means, over any timeline. General Giap grasped exactly what American strategic restraint reflected: not scrupulous proportionality but limited will. Each restriction confirmed, in the Communists’ reading, that the US lacked the stomach for a real fight.
The proof came with Operation Rolling Thunder, launched in 1965: a highly selective bombing campaign designed to send “signals” and bring Hanoi to the table. The message didn’t get through. Rolling Thunder ground on for three years, inflicting damage without dinting the Communists’ unrelenting focus on victory.
When the far deadlier Linebacker campaign of December 1972 finally targeted critical infrastructure, it did induce the North to negotiate – but by then it was far too late: the war was politically lost at home, the endgame already written.

Another image reminded the hive minds that they were stuck in the past: A Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) tank enters the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon on May 1, 1975. Picture: AP

Our Henry continued his flurry of 'Nam references, slowly cranking into later excursions and the lessons to be learned:

As Robert Osgood, who advised presidents Nixon and Reagan, concluded, the US “was in an inferior position in any contest of wills” because its interests were less absolute, and its reliance on public support far greater, than Hanoi’s.
The Tet offensive of January 1968 had proved the point. A military rout for the Communists, it was a political catastrophe for the Johnson administration – all the more so as North Vietnam timed it to resonate in the primaries and the upcoming elections.
The president’s own advisers – the “Wise Men” – told him the war was unwinnable. “If they had been so deeply influenced by Tet,” Johnson noted, “what must the average citizen be thinking?” Giap sensed the change: “Until Tet they thought they could win the war, now they knew they could not.”
From Vietnam, America drew two lessons. First, if you fight, fight to win. “When we commit our troops to combat, we must do so with the sole object of winning,” Reagan’s defence secretary, Caspar Weinberger, declared in 1984, articulating the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine of “decisive force” that marked a return to pre-Vietnam practice.
Second: don’t try to remake foreign nations in America’s image. Entanglement in civil conflicts has a grim internal logic – costs mount, resolve withers – and Tolstoy’s two great warriors, Time and Patience, will outlast any occupier whose electorate tires of deaths and pain.
George W. Bush heeded the first lesson and ignored the second. “Shock and awe” – the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine’s direct progeny – was devastating on the battlefield. But as the second lesson had predicted, “nation-building” turned into a politically unsustainable fiasco.

Still no image of the mad king, with the Kenyan socialist forced into duty: Barack Obama abandoned the first lesson. Picture: AP

Our Henry was keen to drag the Democrats into his sermon:

Reeling from that outcome, Barack Obama abandoned the first lesson too. Nothing made that clearer than the absence of the word “victory” in his 2009 West Point address on strategy. Limited war theory returned under new branding – “strategic patience” – repeating the failed logic of its previous application: a decision in favour of indecision.
Joe Biden then applied that logic to Ukraine, barring Kyiv from striking Russian soil and rationing weapons in cautious – “sufficient but not escalatory” – tranches. That gifted the initiative to Vladimir Putin and turned the conflict into a blood-soaked quagmire.
The Ukraine conflict should have made one thing unmistakeable: graduated escalation is not a strategy; it is a way of avoiding one. But Iran is an even less promising context for the doctrine’s application. Where Hanoi and Moscow each pursued strategic ends, the Iranian regime frames the conflict in categorically different terms: not a contest to be managed but a Holy War, fuelled by an apocalyptic theology of redemptive martyrdom.
Against such an adversary, half-measures are futile. Victory requires the decisive force Obama and Biden would not countenance: a sustained campaign aimed at crippling critical infrastructure, paralysing the regime’s capacity to function and obliterating its offensive capabilities.

At this point in his long exegesis, the hole in bucket man finally got around to mad king Donald, and what a relief, no mention of it being a just war...

Instead, after a strong start, Donald Trump drew a red line and then, seemingly seduced by the lure of the “deal”, deferred the reckoning.
The risk is of a return to the discredited doctrine of limited war, leaving Iran free to attack its neighbours, hold the world economy to ransom, and feign negotiation – or even worse, dictate a deal’s terms.

The reptiles at last realised that the mad king was worthy of a snap, especially one where he showed off his tiny hands without showing his bruises: Donald Trump is counting the cost of his decision to attack Iran. Picture: AP

That would usually warrant the immediate deployment of a cartoon, but the pond was awestruck by the way Our Henry continued with an impeccable set of references, this time with a bearing on the bromancer's absurd blather about a just war:

Wars, Machiavelli warned, begin where you will, but do not end where you please. How this one will end remains clouded by an impenetrable fog in which all options are possible and none certain.
What is clear, however, is that the ramifications reach far beyond the conflict itself. Looking at the United States, it is hard not to recall Joseph Chamberlain’s despairing remark in 1902, as Britain emerged badly shaken from the Second Boer War. Victorious but financially, militarily and politically depleted, Britain was, said Chamberlain, a “weary titan”, staggering “under the too vast orb of its fate”.
The consequences were inexorable: Britain could no longer underwrite the Pax Britannica, and the burden of guarding the global commons slowly passed to the United States. It is that inheritance which is being tested in the Strait of Hormuz.
The problem is that no alternative guarantor stands ready. European governments have neither the military means nor the political will. Accustomed to luxuriating in the benefits of a peace they have done nothing to secure or defend, they mutter fighting words only to immediately walk them back, petrified at the prospect of their own blood being shed. Nor can the gap be filled by the paper tiger of international law, which, unlike real law, is more often invoked against upholders of the rules than against their defiers.
That leaves the United States. But Americans are as divided as at any time since the Civil War, and less willing than ever to shoulder costs from which others make the greatest gain.
For Australia, which has long prospered in the shelter of a powerful ally, the oil price is likely to prove the least of the shocks to come. A country that has never had to assure its own lifelines may now face the harshest challenge of all: a world in which the threats can be trusted but the promises cannot.

And with that the pond must congratulate Our Henry. 

Job done in style, and with bigly historical form.

And not a single mention of the current government of Israel, or its role in the folly, or its expansion into Lebanon, and above all, not a single mention of how Rupert Murdoch advised the mad king to embark on this folly ...

Put it another way, as only the immortal Rowe can do ...

And with that done the pond could turn to an update on the early morning news of the day, and the war was at the top of the LIVE unfolding reptile coverage.

More madness, with fuel and fertiliser high on the list, but the pond resisted the chance to gloat on the matter of EVs.

The numbers are finally turning?

That's the best angle the reptiles could come up with?

Actually if you happened to have gone solar and installed a battery, the numbers turned some time ago... but sticking with gas guzzlers was where the reptiles wanted the country to go.

How incessantly and inanely they preached on the urgent need to avoid renewables, to dwell in the sweet land of coal and gas, and to avoid any attempt to enter the new world of the electrostate.

And now here we are:

Meanwhile, other reptiles were in a state of panic, but luckily the intermittent archive was back in action, so the pond could sent the solemn bouffant one off to that cornfield ...

In serious times, Anthony Albanese flicks the switch to serious
Anthony Albanese’s strategy has collapsed, forcing him to drag Chris Bowen away from his trademark arrogance toward public reassurance.
By Dennis Shanahan

Who knows if that link will last, and so the pond decided to offer a teaser trailer, if only to show the unserious way that the reptiles began with a snap of Albo in decidedly unserious mode ...

A baby snap, and just two minutes of verbiage and not a single mention of the arrogance of the king and his minions?

And that's supposed to be serious reptile talk about the need to be serious?

Follow the reptile way ...

Speaking of reptile panics, the lizard Oz editorialist was also out and about, and suddenly the folly of the mad king was just an excuse to berate Australia for not living in survivalist, full prep mode, and failing to get its kit ready for the trip to the bug out ...

Quick, make sure your bug out bag is full of nitrogen:

If the pond might be so bold ... that header should have read "a fertiliser crisis set in motion by a mad king and his minions, as advised and proposed by mad Rupert Murdoch, who sold his Australian citizenship for a mess of US pottage", but perhaps that's too long and too indigestible for the local hive mind ...

What a pity all the same that we should have copped a wedgie from the loons on the way to the bug out...

Last and decidedly least in the pond's reptile rounds this day came Killer of the IPA ...

The Killer headline: How CPI masks our real wages horror story; Housing has become the dominant economic fact in Australian life. Yet it remains largely invisible in our primary measure of inflation.

The missing caption: the place where the Killer caption should be for the Killer snap of Jimbo, but somehow MIA, even though he's the chief villain and it's all his fault.

Killernomics took a new turn today. 

How to deal with the impact of a completely unnecessary war which has flung international markets into a pickle, and which has begun to have a dire effect on the local economy? And which will certainly compound any inflation issues we were facing.

How to handle a mad excursion by a mad king?

Why, what you do is spend four minutes of reading time - so the reptiles clocked it - by ignoring any talk of war, and instead focusing on IPA Killernomics ...

It's a singular approach, in a singularly Killer way ...

Ordinary people scoff when you tell them the inflation rate is 3.7 per cent. Sure, even the official rate is higher than normal – and rising – but I’m yet to find anyone who believes the CPI is a good indicator of their day-to-day experience.
The government breathed a little sigh of relief this week when the headline rate dropped a tiny bit to 3.7 per cent but according to the 1039 people Roy Morgan surveyed in its latest ANZ collaboration, it had increased to 6.9 per cent in the last week of March. Not quite as pessimistic, the folks at the Melbourne Institute surveyed this month said it was 5.2 per cent.
Consumers generally believe inflation is higher than it officially is, so who’s more correct: the plebs or the boffins?
I’ll side with the plebs on this one. New Institute of Public Affairs research released this week, entitled The CPI Myth: how official inflation statistics ignore house prices and hide a collapse in real wages, sets out how starkly the CPI understates the inflation that most matters.
The official index – bandied around by politicians as if it’s the ultimate arbiter of price pain – ignores the cost of buying a home. It also ignores home loan interest rates and stamp duty.

The reptiles interrupted that IPA promo with an AV distraction... Capital Economics Head of Asia-Pacific Marcel Thieliant claims he expects the RBA to lift rates to 4.6 per cent with inflation expectations at “record high".

Is it wrong to note that there's a war on?

Killer pressed on in a way that even Dame Groan would be forced to admire:

Don’t be fooled by the category of “new dwelling purchase by owner-occupier” – that excludes the cost of buying the land. It is simply the cost of building a home, not acquiring the land underneath it, which can be as much as 90 per cent of the value in Sydney.
Former CBA economist Gareth Aird and I crunched the numbers and put dwelling prices back in the CPI, as the US Bureau of Labour Statistics once did between 1953 and 1983. The impact is staggering and sobering. Real wages are lower now than in 1998 after simply replacing the above misleading category, which has averaged an 8.5 per cent weight in the CPI with dwelling prices.
If we make dwelling prices 15 per cent of our alternative CPI (hardly a tendentious choice given around half of homebuyers spend nearly 40 per cent of their disposable income buying and paying off their home), real wages are almost 10 per cent below their 1998 level.
We can’t find any comparable 27-year period in Australian history when real wages were lower at the end than at the beginning.
“Real wages were going backwards before we came to office, they’re growing under Labor, and we see that again in these figures,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers declared in November, crowing about “the longest period of consecutive annual real wage growth in almost a decade”.
The average capital city dwelling prices in Australia have risen almost 430 per cent since 1998, while the official CPI has risen only 114 per cent. Even with a modest 15 per cent weighting for dwelling prices – keeping everything else in the CPI – it would have increased 155 per cent.
No wonder people increasingly have contempt for Chalmers’ claims and the statistics behind them. Housing has become the dominant economic fact of Australian life. It shapes labour mobility, family formation, savings behaviour and intergenerational inequality. Yet it remains largely invisible in our primary measure of inflation.

Sssh, don't mention the war ... RBA governor Michele Bullock addresses the media. Picture: NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

Surely Killer will now get around to mentioning the way that the current excursion is going to resonate in economies around the world, and drive inflation.

Nah, not on your nelly, you're in the land of Killernomics ...

Mercifully, the CPI does include rents, which made up 6.6 per cent of the CPI last year. Do you know anyone who is spending 7 per cent of their income on rent?
Perhaps the Sydney or Melbourne elite who spend their winter renting villas in Queensland. The typical renter households actually spend around 30 per cent of their income on rent.
In fact, if you’re a plutocrat, the CPI probably might not be a bad gauge for your personal inflation rate. After all, the weights given to the 87 expenditure groups are based on total household spending in the economy. The top 10 per cent of earners make up 30 per cent of the spending.
Bread and milk each account for less than 1 per cent of the CPI, less than new luxury cars; and used cars aren’t in the CPI at all. Automotive fuel accounts for around 3-4 per cent of the CPI, about the same as the combined weight of private school fees, overseas holidays and cruise travel.
They don’t need to include the price of passports, up 100 per cent in a decade to over $420 (the world’s most expensive), either as the wealthy already have one.
To be clear, measuring inflation is difficult. There is no perfect index. Canada still includes home loan rates, for instance. The US experience is a reminder of how politics intrudes on how the CPI is measured.
Until the early 1980s, the US included house prices and home loan interest rates in its CPI. In the late 1970s the Carter administration freaked out over a soaring CPI underpinned by soaring house prices and official interest rates.
Indexed social security payments were spiralling out of control. American income tax scales were also being indexed by this excessively honest CPI too, which was costing Washington billions.

The chief villain was at last identified in the final snap ... Jim Chalmers during a visit to a housing construction project in the suburb of Westmead in Sydney. Picture: Dean Lewins / AAP

Forget about the mad king, it's all the fault of the preening Jimbo ...

Economists to the rescue! Dwellings were deemed “assets” that didn’t belong in the CPI. Henceforth, housing in the US CPI would be based only on rents, including the hypothetical rents owners would be paying themselves were they renting from themselves.
Australians don’t even enjoy the dignity of having their income tax threshold indexed at all, let alone by a more realistic CPI.
When official statistics consistently diverge from people’s lived experience, trust erodes. People begin to doubt not just the numbers, but the institutions producing them. The ABS does produce a few CPI alternatives for pensioners, self-funded retirees and welfare recipients. Perhaps the Boomers running the ABS might consider a couple of other series for renters and homebuyers that include much bigger weightings for rents and dwelling prices, respectively? Though those “real wage” figures wouldn’t look so great then.
So it’s not so reassuring when the Treasurer points to the Reserve Bank forecast that inflation will be back below 3 per cent by the middle of 2027. What else have those forecasts ever said? You can bet it won’t be. But the bigger deceit is what’s in the CPI itself.

Speaking of some fair deceit and cheating, it's remarkable that Killer could spend an entire column entirely removed from thinking about the current folly, but credit where IPA credit is due ...

Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

That's how they do Killernomics at the IPA.

And so to close with the infallible Pope. 

The pond regrets that this matter didn't seem to enter reptile noggins, at least at the top of the digital edition, and certainly not in the columns on the extreme far right. 

Perhaps on the weekend. In the meantime, this ...

Now that detail resonated... and not just for the movie reference ...

And speaking of AV distractions, trouble in Vlad the sociopath land ...

... and trouble in mad King Donald land ...