In which the pond returns to sending reptiles to the intermittent archive, but saves the Caterist and the Major for a savouring ...

 A brief note for students of the cult, anxious to pass their pending herpetological studies exam ...

“The Murdochs” is a messier “Succession”
Netflix's strangely entertaining new docuseries explains the ascendance of Fox News in the age of Trump

That isn't to encourage a Netflix sub - there are other means for those in the know - but it's a fair entertainment, as explained by Melanie McFarland for Salon ...

...“Succession” got that part right more than we knew. When Rupert’s children watched its too-close-for-comfort version of the chaos following Logan Roy’s sudden death, they leapt to nail down their family’s succession plan before it was too late. This provocation sets the narrative in motion, framed by Garbus’ choice to illustrate the children’s ambitions by animating them as pieces on a game board modeled after Monopoly.
If this were a different family, and if we existed in another version of this world, “Dynasty: The Murdochs” might strike us as a tragedy. Time and again, Garbus and her experts’ perspectives responsibly remind us that we’re watching a father shatter the bonds between his children. But this same factor, combined with Rupert Murdoch’s leading role in distorting the public’s relationships with facts and truth, makes it easier to view all this from a distance.

And again ...

...In the end, Lachlan received the long-sought kiss from daddy while James discovered, through an assortment of leaks, how much his mother and father couldn’t stomach him. How unfortunate. Also, how much is this family worth after all that? Forbes places its current estimate in the ballpark of $22.6 billion.
For all the emotional and psychological detail like this spilled in “Dynasty: The Murdochs,” it doesn’t make a play for our sympathies or leave us feeling any particular way about these people. What struck me instead is how ably Garbus presents what Rupert Murdoch and men like him have wrought as not just a blight on society but a pox on all our houses, including his own. The right’s parasocial relationship with such families keeps them in business because it profits them for some of the smallfolk to believe they share our frailties, or that we might become one of them someday. After all, a multibillion-dollar net worth pays for plenty of therapy.

No doubt some think the Ellison family is the new media dynasty to watch, but the pond remains loyal, because there's nothing more compelling than the decline of a family through hubris and shifting fortunes ...

And now, with the paywall clanging shut on the lizard Oz, the pond can return to performing its community service ... and the good news is that the intermittent archive has returned, at least for the moment, so the pond consign assorted whining reptile snowflakes to that cornfield (warning, errors still abound)...

Off you go ...

Women on the ‘right’ cop short shrift in Australia

Conservative women face a selective standard that questions their political legitimacy
Female political credibility gets distributed unevenly based on ideology, with conservative women’s motives questioned rather than their arguments engaged.
By Julianna Burgess
Contributor

You want to play with the team led by the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way? 

Learn how to use a stiff arm while abandoning humanity ...

The pond will do a teaser trailer because the opening was very droll ...

Did you notice?

In classic fashion, the reptiles opened that piece with a gormless snap of a meaningless table and chairs sighting - women, stay in the kindy - with the illustration the cover for a male shadow minister blathering into the void ...

Meanwhile you could read in another place ...

Matt Canavan and the male breadwinner model: A throwback to the ’50s
Jacqueline Maley (*intermittent archive link)

...Professor Hodgson points out that income splitting doesn’t account for what we now know about financial control within abusive relationships, not to mention women’s increasing desire for financial autonomy within marriage.
“The policy is a throwback to the main breadwinner model that we became accustomed to until the ’70s and ’80s, when it was normal to have one person earning and the other person at home,” says Professor Hodgson.
And here lies the social narrative behind the fiscal arguments for income splitting.
Last year, the opposition inflicted untold damage on itself with its election policy to restrict working-from-home for public servants.
The Liberals were blindsided by the huge backlash against that policy – it was as though no one in their ranks had spoken to, or even passed in the street, a contemporary working family in the previous five years.
The fiasco over that policy only worsened the Liberals’ so-called “Woman Problem”.
There are benefits to income splitting, and as teal independent Allegra Spender keeps saying, our system taxes incomes too highly, and wealth too lightly.
But the Coalition needs to be careful in proposing a tax strategy that preferences the male-breadwinner family model, which penalises single parents, and which threatens to hamper female workforce participation.
They risk repeating the mistakes of the past, and projecting themselves, again, as a party that refuses to accept the reality of how working families manage themselves in 2026.
Not how they used to, in a romanticised past – a rose-tinted time when families could survive on a single income, when women were discouraged from working outside the home, and when Hills Hoists were still proudly Australian.

Have a good time in the 1950s Julianna ...

The pond also sent this off to the cornfield ...

Taxpayer-funded Jew hate is now just par for the course
‘Antisemitism is welcome’: How a DJ’s rant exposed a crisis in Australia
Australia’s premier arts festival becomes flashpoint for antisemitism debate as DJ’s conspiracy theories expose cultural institutions’ failure to maintain basic decency standards.
By Nick Dyrenfurth

Instead of that, what with Israel bombing the bejesus out of Lebanon and Iran, and using that as cover for ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Gaza, time to note another piece in Haaretz ...

Black Flags and War Crimes: Should Israeli Soldiers in Gaza Refuse to Obey Orders?

The issue of the refusal to obey military orders remains one of the most sensitive, toxic subjects in Israel. But with the IDF assault on northern Gaza leading to expulsion of Palestinian civilians and a humanitarian crisis, some Israelis believe that these are war crimes and illegal orders that soldiers are obliged to refuse

This Tuesday marked the 68th anniversary of the massacre at Kafr Qasem. On October 29, 1956, Israel's Border Police opened fire on Arab citizens, civilians returning from agricultural work, claiming they were ordered to enforce a new wartime curfew that had been announced while the laborers were away in their fields. When it was over, 50 unarmed civilians were dead.
The massacre was a stain on Israel's conscience, but Israeli Jews tend to recall that justice was done: a special military tribunal eventually convicted a number of the perpetrators and sentenced them to jail time. Most famously, Justice Benjamin Halevy issued a landmark ruling rejecting the defendants' arguments that they were following orders to shoot anyone arriving after curfew. Instead, he warned that a soldier who receives a manifestly illegal order, so terrible that a "black flag" flies above it, is not only permitted but obliged to disobey.
This Tuesday, coinciding with the Kafr Qasem anniversary, the Israel Defense Forces attacked Beit Lahia in the north of Gaza, killing over 94, according to Palestinian reports. Over the previous week, Gaza's Ministry of Health reported that 343 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, before the Beit Lahia attack, and though the ministry doesn't distinguish combatants, many of the casualties are women and children, according to UN documentation. On Wednesday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller noted that the United States had "not seen sufficient improvement," in humanitarian aid reaching northern Gaza since the Biden administration warned Israel that the drastic lack of aid could threaten U.S. arms exports to Israel. The situation there is catastrophic, in all areas.
Some Israelis now regard the IDF actions in northern Gaza as a black flag requiring Israeli soldiers to refuse illegal orders.
Tel Aviv University legal scholar Eliav Lieblich wrote on X that if reports that the Netanyahu government was actually intending to transfer the Palestinian civilian population out of northern Gaza for political aims were true, "this is a manifestly illegal order." Lieblich was referring to the implementation of the so-called Generals' Plan, which has been widely discussed in the media as the apparent government strategy. This was bolstered by a report by Amit Segal, a top political correspondent for Israeli TV close to the prime minister.
Oxford University research fellow and political theorist Shai Agmon elaborated: "If the IDF is expelling Palestinians from the north of the [Gaza] Strip with no intention of allowing them to return, in order to conquer parts of the Strip and change the borders, through starving those who remain – this is a war crime and a manifestly illegal order. According to the instructions of the [Israeli] army, executing such an order is prohibited." Agmon told me that this instruction appears in the IDF's code of ethics and is taught regularly in training courses for officers and others.
Tomer Persico, a religious scholar at Jerusalem's Shalom Hartman Institute, made a similar case in a recent Haaretz opinion article. He quoted decades-old statements of liberal, left-wing politicians of an earlier generation saying: "The day the order for transfer is given, which is a manifestly illegal order, is also the day of refusing the order."

And at the end ...

...Raz believes there are no public sources to say how often soldiers invoke the black flag doctrine to refuse an order. Etzion relates that, anecdotally, he has heard of widespread de facto refusal (mostly via quiet deals between the refusers and their commanding officers) – the non-declarative, nonideological kind: People exhausted after 200 days on active duty, or their businesses on the verge of collapse. Haaretz's Amos Harel reports concerns within the IDF about low reporting for reserve units too.
Moreover, even the Kafr Qasem tragedy didn't end with an upstanding moral breakthrough. Those who were jailed for murder had their sentences commuted. When the most senior officer put on trial, Issachar Shadmi, was finally convicted (on a technicality only), he was fined 10 prutot. In his book about the history of the massacre, Raz found a newsletter from the time observing that a glass of soda water cost 30 prutot. He says that today's soldiers, who film themselves publicly bragging about possible criminal acts in this war, know very well that there will be no consequences.
Still, one of the biggest surprises regarding Etzion was not that a former official who served under four Israeli prime ministers would advocate refusing an illegal order, or war crimes. What was surprising was hearing Etzion relate that the reactions from family, friends, communities on- and offline were mainly supportive.
Most Israelis can't use the word "genocide." But some are finding other, more homegrown forms of protesting the moral abyss of the Gaza war.

Genocide will do fine when contemplating the current moral abyss of Israel ...

A couple of the reptiles were concerned with Jimbo. 

Off to the cornfield with them ...

Budget is Jim’s big test to show he’s up for serious reform
While Chalmers maintains the budget will still be a reform budget, will his cabinet colleagues retain any zeal for hard decisions when the landscape has changed so dramatically?
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

Conflict delivers Chalmers his own ‘banana republic’ moment
Iran War has handed Jim Chalmers chance for his own ‘banana republic’ reform
Just as Keating warned in 1986 that Australia’s high debt and reliance on natural resources exports could turn us into a ‘banana republic’, the Treasurer sees the oil crisis as a chance to be bold.
By Dennis Shanahan
National Editor

The pond personally saved those for correspondents' pleasure, but why settle for standard reptile fare when the careening Caterist is to hand to advise on the movement of flood waters in quarries and sundry other matters, including the movement of oil?

A little introductory note will come in handy thanks to Tamworth's enduring shame ... per the ABC:

...In 2020, the Coalition government announced it would take advantage of historically low fuel prices and establish a strategic fuel reserve on American soil to meet the 90-day minimum required by international agreements.
Then energy minister Angus Taylor argued it was an "extraordinary" opportunity but Labor said situating the reserve overseas would do little to minimise concerns Australia was vulnerable to international disruptions.
"The first thing about doing something stupid is not acknowledging it and continuing to do it," Mr Joyce said on Sunday.

Only Barners could note the enormous stupidity of his mob back in the day, and stupidly think that no one would notice the stupidity.

And speaking of continuing stupidity ...

The header: Labor is out of its depth in spiralling energy security crisis; A single regional conflict can disrupt energy markets and send prices surging. Yet in a world that suddenly seems more serious, Bowen responds by beclowning himself.

The caption: Minister for Climate Change and Energy of Australia Chris Bowen holds a press conference in Smithfield. Picture: Jeremy Piper

The pond happened to be in a Sydney Geely EV dealership on the weekend, and the salesman reported booming sales. 

Apparently the Gulf war has seen some, especially those with solar on the roof, finally see the charms of renewables and EV cars.

That's merely to note that there a lot out there with more nous (νοῦς if you will) than a dimwit of the cratering Caterist kind ...

In 2021, the Morrison government was accused of writing a blank cheque to stop oil refining from disappearing offshore.
“There are a number of budget measures vying for top spot as the most brazen fossil fuel subsidy,” wrote the Australia Institute’s Audrey Quick, “but paying Australia’s oil refineries an undisclosed amount to stay open is a strong contender.”
With hindsight, the modest payments then energy minister Angus Taylor offered to keep the Lytton and Geelong refineries operating is arguably the most sensible intervention in Australia’s energy sector in recent years.
They may not produce enough fuel to satisfy the country’s needs, but they will at least ensure that if things turn bad, Australia’s air force will not be waiting for the next tanker from Shanghai before it can take to the skies.
With budgetary pressures mounting, and the strategic outlook deteriorating, it might be a sensible time to scrutinise some of the recent blank cheques government has written in the hope of phasing out carbon emissions by the middle of the century.
Last year, the government announced it would spend $2.3bn to subsidise the installation of household batteries, $300m more than the Morrison government budgeted for in its 2021 Fuel Security Package.

The pond was surprised that the Caterist hadn't urged the immediate despatch of a flotilla to the gulf to sort out the unruly Persians, a gesture which would surely have been made if the liar from the Shire was still to hand in forelock-tugging mode ...Scott Morrison. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Inevitably the Caterist saw the current kerfuffle as a way to attack renewables, which is what he always does when confronted with a solution that doesn't conform to his myopia...

As recently as two weeks ago, Chris Bowen was claiming his Cheaper Home Batteries scheme had been a runaway success. More than 250,000 home batteries had been installed with a total capacity of 6.4 gigawatt hours.
It was “a remarkable achievement”, he claimed, “better for the planet and better for the pocket”.
Whose pockets was he referring to? Not taxpayer pockets – obviously – since, as we learned in the Mid-Year Economic Forecast, the cost of the scheme blew out to $7.2bn in less than six months, triple its initial budget. It prompted swift changes to the terms of the subsidies.
The fringe benefits tax exemption for electric vehicles purchased through novated leases is also under review. It was expected to cost the budget around $1.9bn between the 2022 and 2027 financial years. Updated estimates suggest the total cost will instead reach about $5.1bn over the same period.
It is a reflection of the lack of discipline in Canberra that the ability to shovel public money out the door faster than promised is chalked up as an achievement by this government. The government has adopted the big-hearted Arthur approach to fiscal management. Budget blowouts are apparently virtuous if they are channelled into worthy causes.
As he approaches his fifth budget, Jim Chalmers has every incentive to restore some rigour to the process by weighing the costs of its programs against their actual benefits, rather their intended benefits.
As the Productivity Commission reported in August, FBT exemption on EVs is an extraordinarily expensive way to reduce carbon emissions ranging from $1000 to $20,000 a tonne. Discounting fuel excise duty on E10 petrol, for example, would produce the same benefit for roughly a tenth of a price, even if it lacks the same green kudos.

The reptiles introduced a reminder of Malware, Snowy Hydro launched its new tunnel boring machine, Monica, in early February. Source: Snowy Hydro

Speaking of boring, the Caterist cranked his denialism up to his usual eleven...

Batteries too are an inefficient and costly way to reduce emissions, even more so when they are installed at household level. Home batteries can reduce peak demand and help smooth short-term fluctuations, but they do not solve the core intermittency problem. The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates that the saving to customers across the National Energy Market from faster battery uptake is just 3 per cent.
No matter how hard you juggle the data, the inescapable conclusion is that this is low-grade public policy, poorly conceived and clumsily executed.
The budget estimates attached to the programs turn out to be utterly worthless. Ultimately, the cost depends on the take-up, and the responsible minister has a strong incentive to maximise the take-up so that he or she can boast of its “success”.
Even less attention is paid to ballooning capital costs of energy infrastructure, which are hidden off budget. Yet cost overruns and completion delays on major projects such as Snowy Hydro matter if this government is serious about intergenerational equity.
We await to see how faithfully the Treasurer follows his own brief of making savings central to May’s budget. His record is not strong. Short-term royalty windfalls from high commodity prices disappeared into spending rather than paying down debt.
Short-term revenue boost from higher inflation is likely to disappear the same way, which would be foolish, since the effect of government spending is to add further fuel to inflation.
What the government now faces is not merely a fiscal problem but a policy crisis. Having tied itself to the net-zero target, it is fast running out of workable ways of reaching its objective on any timetable.

The reptiles flung the Canavan caravan into the breach, because who doesn't want to return to the 1950s? 

New Nationals Leader Matt Canavan claims the Labor government has put Australia in a “weaker position” to handle the oil price shock as the Iran conflict escalates. “The problem is the government started wth inflation already at the highest level in the developed world,” Mr Canavan told Sky News Australia. “Because they couldn't control their own budget, they have put Australia in a much weaker position to withstand the shocks of this kind of crisis.”

Then there came a final reminder of the hive mind ... the Caterist quoting the Ughmann, who was likely quoting some other reptile, rinse and repeat, in an endless cycle of the hive mind feeding on itself ...

As Chris Ulhmann reminded us at the weekend, after 20 years of “transitioning”, Australia depends on oil, coal and gas for some 90 per cent of the energy we consume. The prospect of an extended global energy crisis exposes the net-zero project as a dangerous political distraction from the fundamental challenge of energy security. The implicit assumption was that energy security had been solved: global markets would provide whatever fuel or electricity the system required.
It was further confused by the wishful thinking that imagined that wind and solar were reliable replacements for the energy sources on which we’ve depended for the past 200 years.
The war in Ukraine has already demonstrated how dangerous that assumption can be. When the geopolitical climate shifted, the consequences were immediate. The war in Iran offers a similar warning. The global economy still relies heavily on oil shipments passing through narrow maritime chokepoints. A single regional conflict can disrupt energy markets and send prices surging. Yet in a world that suddenly seems more serious, Bowen responds by beclowning himself.
“There’s one form of energy that Vladimir Putin cannot disrupt,” he told an interviewer last week, “and that’s the flow of sun to our landmass and the flow of wind on and off our shores.”
Bowen’s reserves of flippancy are apparently inexhaustible.

And the Caterist's reserves of stupidity are definitely inexhaustible. Perhaps he could head over to King Donald's court to get himself a fresh supply every so ofen.

And that brings the pond to that most faithful relic, the always reliable columnist for the Australian Daily Zionist News, Major Mitchell...

The header: US targets Iran in strategic move to rein in its most powerful ally: China; When Donald Trump muses the US might need to take over the Strait of Hormuz, he is not just talking about protecting oil tankers from possible Iranian attacks. He is sending a coded message to China.

The caption: A worker sits amid the rubble of residential buildings that were destroyed a few days ago following the US and Israeli attack in the eastern Tehran area on March 12. Picture: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

A couple of opening notes.

It doesn't seem to dawn on the Major that China is a major trading partner, and so what takes them down also takes Australia down.

And as for coded messages, how coded is this?

Trump calls for help from allies, China to open besieged oil route

London | US President Donald Trump has urged allies, as well as China, to send warships to help get oil flowing again through the Strait of Hormuz as he threatened to intensify attacks on Iran’s crucial Kharg Island fuel depot and port complex.
“We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are,” Trump posted on his Truth Social media platform on Saturday night (Sunday AEDT).
Donald Trump claims US forces "totally obliterated" military targets on Iran's oil export hub, Kharg Island.
“Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated,” he wrote.
Iran, meanwhile, singled out the United Arab Emirates for reprisals, accusing it of helping facilitate the US strikes. It is also reportedly considering allowing the oil tankers to transit the strait if they pay for their cargo in the Chinese yuan, a move that would strike at the power of the US dollar in financial markets and the trading system.

King Donald wants China to help, while the Major gloats about China's demise? Talk about that 2D checkers the reptiles love to play.

But, if the pond might talk to King Donald, you had a complete victory in the first hour, you doofus, so why don't you just f*ck off and enjoy your triumph with your fawning minions?  (*google bot safe).

Now on with the Major, starting by being kinda funny...

It’s funny how many world leaders are finally joining the dots about Iran and its long war on Israel – dots that extend to US efforts to rein in China.
It’s really only the presence of US President Donald Trump in Israel’s latest campaign against Iran that has forced the hands of leaders from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian PM Mark Carney to our very own Israeli antagonist, Anthony Albanese.
All had condemned Israel’s war in Gaza to retrieve its hostages from Iran’s Hamas terror subsidiary, and all had prematurely recognised a Palestinian state, even though there had been no election for 20 years, no recognised Palestinian borders and nothing like a government.
Albanese even assured Australians last August that Palestinian National Association President Mahmoud Abbas had promised him personally by phone that he would end “pay per slay” – the grotesque scheme to pay Palestinian terrorists a stipend while they were in Israeli jails. The families of “martyrs” also receive a stipend.

It's funny how silly the Major routinely manages to sound, but that's what happens when you're a Benji sock puppet ... Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during the 32nd Palestinian Liberation Organisation Central Council session in Ramallah last year in April. Picture: Zain JAAFAR /AFP

Of course the Major was going to be in war monger mode ...

Yet all these national leaders now support the Israeli-US war on Iran, which is really just the end of Israel’s defensive war on Hamas and Hezbollah. The UK has offered the US use of British bases, France is offering naval support to protect the Strait of Hormuz, and Carney has publicly backed the war.
Albanese is sending an RAAF E-7A Wedgetail surveillance jet, 85 personnel and air-to-air missiles. He says all will be used to help protect the United Arab Emirates.
However it’s spun, Albanese is joining the effort against Iran.
The government is conceding to the reality of US action and our historical relationship with America – a $368bn partner in the AUKUS submarine project and ANZUS ally.
Yet Labor in its private moments must see the contradiction: it is joining an effort against Iran that it criticised when that effort was led by Israel against Iran’s proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen. It is in effect admitting Iran is the danger Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu always claimed it was.
Perhaps our government can see a bigger picture most media have missed. The US may be interested in a lot more than keeping nuclear weapons out of Iran’s hands and toppling a dangerous regime.
Claims at the ABC that Trump is being pushed into action by Netanyahu don’t stack up. Trump pulled Netanyahu into line several times last year.
He forced the Gaza peace deal on Netanyahu in October. He chastised Netanyahu in June for continuing with strikes on Iran after Trump had negotiated a truce and publicly declared America had destroyed Iran’s nuclear program.
Remember, Trump ordered Israel to turn around an attack that already had been launched: Netanyahu claimed the truce with Tehran had been breached on June 24 when it fired a single rocket into Israel.
Trump wrote on social media at the time: “Israel. Do not drop those bombs. If you do, it is a major violation. Bring your pilots home now.”
He followed that up with a blunt public declaration: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f.ck they’re doing.”

The reptiles introduced a snap of the King, President Donald Trump in the East Room at the White House last Thursday. Picture: Allison Robbert/AP Photo

The pond apologises, but whenever the King makes an appearance, the pond has a strange compulsion to follow with a 'toon ...

Back to the Major ...

What changed since June? Clearly, Trump is on board with the latest action. He moved two aircraft carrier battle groups into the region before the first shot was fired and may send a third.
Jerusalem Post political editor Haviv Rettig Gur called Trump’s real aims early on Substack on March 3 in a piece titled 'This Isn’t Israel’s War. It’s America’s’.
Rettig Gur argued the war was like two chess games – a local Middle East game and a much bigger global game. That global game was about Trump’s views on China.
Iran is one of Xi Jinping’s closest allies, along with Russia and North Korea. China breaks sanctions against Iranian oil exports, taking about 1.2 billion barrels a year from the Iranians, all shipped through the Strait of Hormuz.
When Trump muses the US might need to take over the Strait, he is not just talking about protecting oil tankers from possible Iranian attacks. He is sending a coded message to China, which has illegally claimed the South China Sea for decades: two can play that game.
“Iranian oil, sold cheaply because Tehran has no other buyers, has helped Beijing to build a strategic petroleum reserve exceeding a billion barrels, enough … for 100 days in the event of a naval blockade,” Gur writes.
“China’s single greatest vulnerability is the American navy's ability to interdict its energy imports … Iranian oil, flowing outside American oversight, was a direct hedge against that vulnerability. So … was Venezuela another US operation ultimately about containing China?"
The US in February also became concerned China was planning to arm Iran with hypersonic anti-ship cruise missiles capable of speeds above Mach 3. The US believed Iran was becoming “a Chinese forward base, a linchpin of the country’s naval architecture … positioned at the throat of global oil supply", according to Gur.
Israel has been targeting sites that could hit Israel. The US started with attacks on the south, targeting Iranian naval vessels, submarines, ports and anti-ship missile positions. It hit the Iranian navy HQ at Bandar Abbas and facilities at Jask, where China hoped to establish a naval base.
Zineb Riboua, researcher at the Hudson Institute, nailed it on The Australian’s opinion page on March 11.
Xi Jinping “bet a decade of foreign policy on [Ayatollah] Khamenei’s ability to survive American pressure", she writes.

Another snap of the King interrupted the Major's flow, US President Donald Trump with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in October at the Gimhae Air Base, located next to the Gimhae International Airport in Busan. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP

The pond is always willing to help out, and wonders whether the King has considered all the strategies available to him...

Meanwhile, the Major was still gloating about China ...

Riboua cites three problems the US Operation Epic Fury presents for China.
First, China needs “a defiant Tehran to keep Washington pinned down in the Gulf, to sustain a sanctions-proof energy corridor and … to stand as living evidence that American power had hard limits”.
Second, the American action undermines Xi’s entire narrative of declining Western power.
And finally, because China takes more than 80 per cent of all oil that Iran ships, a systemic collapse in Iran shifts the Gulf’s strategic balance “decisively towards Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose energy ties with the US are strengthening”.
Remember, Trump has been promoting the Abraham Accords with Israel to Saudi Arabia. Morocco, Bahrain and the UAE have already signed.
“The truly vicious part of Beijing’s situation is that Iran’s entire playbook for retaliation was designed to punish Washington, but the geography and economics of each weapon mean the damage lands on China instead,” Riboua argues.
“Iranian missiles aimed at Gulf states threaten oil infrastructure and port facilities that Chinese companies have spent billions investing in across the region.”
America is energy self-sufficient and the world’s biggest oil and gas producer.
Left-wing journalists have been arguing every American military action since the first Gulf War in 1991 was about oil. Now it really is – oil for China.

The reptiles flung in an image designed to irritate the Major ... John Lyons, the Americas editor for ABC News, is based in Washington.

But there's no way a snap of a man inclined to sensible summaries could enlighten the Major ...

ABC Americas Editor John Lyons and Global Affairs Editor Laura Tingle, who claim Netanyahu has been forcing Trump’s hand, need to get off the one-way bus lane that channels every journalistic thought towards Israel and the Jews.
If they checked mainstream Israeli media rather than Haaretz – Israel’s daily equivalent of Australia’s Green Left Weekly – they would know Israeli journalists have been asking what Israel should do if Trump finishes in Iran before Netanyahu has achieved Israel’s goals. Israeli journalists know who’s in the driver's seat, win or lose.

Give the pond Haaretz every day of the week. 

It's one of the few hopes that Israel will turn from its current sociopathic genocidal path ...

The Major might think the senseless murder of 150+ schoolgirls a strategic triumph, but count the pond out.

And so to wrap up proceedings with the immortal Rowe of the day ...

And here's a trailer, which should be enough for students to pass their herpetology exam without enduring the whole thing ...