It's too much, but here's the time when the bromancer, the dog botherer and the Ughmann walked into a reptile bar on the weekend ...

 

After the bromancer's recent outing, in which he deemed mad King Donald's Iran excursion a "just war", with all the gravitas of a medieval theologian, the pond was incredibly anxious to see where his next missive might take us - perhaps into the white Xian nationalist holy war turf favoured by medieval crusaders?

Tossing aside all distractions, the pond rushed to the read, with a snail-baited breath, and was incredibly disappointed ...

The poor lad could only manage a bout of flag-waving nationalism, though attentive readers will note that every so often the "white" and the "Xian" aspects of the new age of authoritarianism bubble to the surface.

The header: Nationalism trumps globalism. Ask Trump, Farage, Hanson and voters; Loving your country is natural and good. It’s the left’s hatred of Australia and America that is sick.

The caption for the flag-waving designed to stir Pauline's cult: Children wave Australian flags in Sydney for an Anzac Day march. Picture: Mark Evans / Getty Images

Ah, we're back in the days of I love my country, I salute the flag, I honour the Queen and I promise to obey her laws, and for a bigly five minutes get stuck in the ancient corridors of Tamworth Public School, as the bromancer does his salutin' thing.

And see how the "dead white male" pops up in the very first gobbet:

Nationalism is clobbering globalism, all over the West, all over the world, even in Australia. The process is dramatically accelerated by the war in Iran and the resultant energy crisis.
Nationalism explains the huge One Nation vote in South Australia. It’s also the only way to interpret Peter Malinauskas shrewdly reading a Henry Lawson poem as he claimed victory. Now which voters do you think might be attracted by Lawson? The Greens? Inner-city academic lefties? Mmm.
Not only is Lawson a dead white male, he was an avatar of old Australian nationalism. In a poem the South Australian Premier didn’t quote, My Land and I, Lawson wrote: “The parasites dine at your tables spread … But we heed them never my land, my land, for we know how small they are … as we gaze on a rising star.”
All over the West, nationalism is rising. This demands serious analysis. Two big mistakes are to think it’s an irrational response by a deluded electorate or that it’s inherently wicked.

Naturally the reptiles had to feature Pauline, the bromancer's new guide to all that's right and true and just: One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson at Parliament House on Tuesday. Picture: Lukas Coch /AAP

After that visual flourish, the bromancer tried a little billy goat butt:

None of this is to argue Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is a good vehicle to express legitimate Australian nationalism. 

But he didn't really mean that butt. 

He was all in, he was full Pauline, and not even in drag ...

Australia will be best served if the Liberal and National parties get a shot of adrenalin and revive, communicating everything good in patriotism and nationalism. Both major parties need to do this. Malinauskas quotes Lawson. Nationals leader Matt Canavan urges us to “manifest a hyper Australia”. Even Anthony Albanese borrows Tony Abbott’s “Team Australia”.
The oil and gas shock from the Iran war demonstrates nationalism is a rational response to the failure of conventional Western politics. We can no longer rely on economic globalisation and markets to deliver “just in time”. We’re going to have to pay serious money to stockpile stuff, from oil to weapons. We’re going to have to pay even more to subsidise producing critical stuff in Australia.
Conventional globalisation sees us reduced to a quarry, a farm and a high-cost services economy. But geo-strategic realities mean following that model makes us gravely vulnerable. We’ve deindustrialised to a monstrous extent. Energy costs, universal welfare, prohibitive taxation and medieval industrial relations have made us a wildly expensive country to do business in. We need to solve all that. But in the short term we’ve got to pay for stockpiles and production. That’s if we’re nationalists, loving our nation, defending its right to independence, agency and, ultimately, survival.
There are other ways nationalism answers contemporary policy failures. Geo-strategic reordering means the US alliance, while still vital to our security, is looser and less absolutely reliable. So we must be more nationalist, ready to fight for ourselves. Militarily, the Albanese government shows no sign of that, instead voluntarily embracing eurosclerosis socially, economically and militarily.

The alternative? European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s visit marks a step change in EU-Australia security ties. Picture: Getty Images

Can't have any of that eurosclerosis.

The alternative? Embrace your inner Vlad the Sociopath, go full King Donald, imbibe a bigly dose of Kegsbreath ...

Nationalism works socially, too. There’s a collapse of order on the streets, and of morale, among young people particularly, who take their own lives in shocking numbers. Nationalism propels a society to look to its own traditions for resources of meaning, solidarity, morality. Nationalism is traditionalism. In a good society, or one that was once (mostly) good, traditions contain great wisdom (including openness to incremental change).
Nationalism answers identity politics dysfunction. Here’s a key paradox. Democratic nationalism, for all its nation-specific patriotism, is universal within the nation. If you’re a true Australian nationalist, you love every Australian.
Nor is nationalism wicked or immoral. Extreme nationalism, like extreme anything else, is wicked. Extreme nationalism gave us Nazism, extreme egalitarianism gave us communism, extreme Islamism gave us the ayatollahs’ theocracy. But loving your nation is as natural as loving your kids.
This has always underlain the Western tradition. Christianity is a universal religion open to every human being, but that universalism doesn’t cut against particularly loving your family or your nation.

It almost goes without saying that the bromancer would be infatuated by the worst pope of recent times, but the bromancer will say it anyway, what with him being an Xian nationalist ...

Pope John Paul II, the greatest recent pope, emphasised the natural goodness in attachment to nation. The Jewish and Christian traditions believe God first revealed himself to a nation, the Jewish nation. Nationalism is an engine of much Western politics today and partly explains the victories of Donald Trump, the poll lead of Nigel Farage and the sudden rise of One Nation.

Is it wrong to point out a theological nicety here? 

Actually the Jewish god is not the Xian god, because Xians are inclined to trinitarianism (only a few cling to the unitarian heresy), and so Christ is meant to be god, or at least a third of god, which no sensible Jew (or atheist) could ever believe.

So the god that revealed himself to the Jewish tribe (according to its wiki, the modern idea of nations began around the sixteenth century) was certainly not the Xian god.

And speaking of god, here the gods of two cults ...US President Donald Trump and Nigel Farage at a MAGA rally in 2020. Picture: Brendan Smialowski / AFP

The bromancer is clearly infatuated by these cults ...

Generally, nationalist movements need a figurehead with long-established nationalist credentials, someone preferably who suffered a bit for their convictions, who unashamedly puts their nation first and who people could imagine leading a government. Trump and Farage satisfy these criteria. 

They do? Is what's happening in the USA at the moment leadership? Or a demonic narcissist enfeebled by dementia at the head of a cult?

The bromancer sees Pauline as joining this choice leadership team ... apparently the more you stumble blind drunk into a gutter, the more authentic you seem. 

That's why there's so many authentic leaders at Maguires pub in Peel street ...

Hanson falls down on the last, but it may be that the new duo-leadership of Hanson plus Barnaby Joyce just about gets there. Hanson’s stuttering delivery and Joyce’s many misadventures confirm their anti-politics “authenticity”.
Commentators completely misunderstand much of this. Sean Kelly, an often insightful writer in the Nine newspapers, listed racism as a core appeal of One Nation. With respect to Kelly, I think that’s dead wrong.
A YouGov poll this week had One Nation on 27 per cent support, just behind Labor. Among Millennials, One Nation actually came in first, with 30 per cent. Neither 27 per cent of Australians nor 30 per cent of young Australians are racist. Not one speck.
Here’s another thing. If centre-right parties are at all smart, migrants and their children will be among the strongest nationalists in their adopted nations.
I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing both former British prime minister Rishi Sunak and the current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Both are profoundly English, deeply in love with all the good things of England. Sunak told me how much his parents admired Margaret Thatcher, who always stood up for people like them.

Dear sweet long absent lord, for a brief moment there, the bromancer put down his racist glasses, as the reptiles went all in on the new bro cult, Pauline Hanson’s stuttering delivery and Barnaby Joyce’s many misadventures confirm their anti-politics ‘authenticity’. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

And so to the bromancer going full King Donald for his final flourish of floozies:

The theme song at Trump rallies is God Bless the USA, a mournful though sweet country and western elegy, which says: “There ain’t no doubt I love this land, God bless the USA”.
This should not remotely be seen as especially right wing or objectionable. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the most important progressive politician in the 20th century, in his 1940 presidential campaign used the much more treacly God Bless America as his theme song. That song was written by a Russian Jewish immigrant, Irving Berlin, while he was serving in the US Army. Berlin loved and cherished the USA.
Once upon a time the left had the wit, and moral substance, to proudly proclaim their patriotism. Woodie Guthrie, on the far, far left, wrote his famous lyrics: “This land was made for you and me”. This song itself was later attacked by the dreary, woke, identity-politics mavens. Didn’t Guthrie realise this was stolen land? Didn’t he know the US was illegitimate from the start, just as the left grotesquely refers to “so-called Australia” on land “that was never ceded”, as though there’s something illegitimate about Australia and its 28 million people?
The left and Islamists make common cause because they have a common enemy – our nation, our civilisation. Millions die in Sudan but no leftist says a word about it because you can’t easily attack the West over Sudan. The left doesn’t hate suffering or injustice – it hates the West.
For years I went round Southeast Asia visiting Islamist extremists. Certain Western books and authors were always on their book shelves – Noam Chomsky, John Pilger etc. Islamists rejoiced in Western testimony that nations such as Australia and America were evil.
But you know what? God bless Australia, this land was made for you and me.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

What to say? Ain't my god, and he can stick his blessings.

He gets worse by the week, as the world heads towards the rapture ...

And so, before proceeding any further, please permit the pond to pause and see where this celebration, this Chairman Emeritus approved and encouraged excursion, has landed the country this weekend:

Oh that can't be good ...

And now, before turning to the dog botherer, the pond just wanted to mention yesterday's Weekly Beast, as always essential reading.

Murdoch mastheads at odds as sexual assault survivor speaks up about The Australian’s podcast

Delicious stuff, all the more so because the pond never wanders off its narrow lizard Oz path to follow the reptile podcasts, desperate attempts to keep up and be relevant, like back in the day when they took to blogging for a few years.

That tale of internal feuds was followed by an even more delicious observation, ABC strike fires up Sky.

And who was the star there?

...Chris Kenny, whose signature move at Sky has been to attack the ABC, was outraged that his favourite shows were off the air.
Although Kenny derides ABC content as “green left”, he was furious that the strike was “depriving us of our normal services” and he called for presenters, who had told viewers they were going on strike to demand better pay and conditions, to be sacked.
Kenny also made sledges, including: “They’ll probably never rate higher.”
For a 24-hour news channel that regularly calls for the ABC to be privatised or de-funded, Sky spent a lot of time talking about how much viewers would miss. One reporter told a presenter, Peter Stefanovic, that “viewers wanted to tune in to watch the news at seven” but had to settle for Hard Quiz. One headline said: “ABC viewers forced to watch comedy reruns.”
The reporter said: “This morning, when viewers wanted to tune in to the ABC Breakfast show, well, they instead had to watch the international coverage from ABC’s UK affiliates, BBC.”
The shadow communications minister, Sarah Henderson, was given a lot of airtime to say the strike was a “disgrace” but also appeared to back the important work the ABC does: “There has never been a more important time in this country when we need ABC journalists and other content makers to be out in the field informing Australians.”

So the strike was worth it, if only so the pond could experience a weekend irony overload.

And now maestro, a blaze of trumpets puh-leaze as the dog botherer enters from extreme far right stage:

The header: Inside the warped world of the manosphere and its war on real masculinity; As the father of four sons, this topic is personal and imperative.

The caption for the astonishing collage, a major artwork, which outrageously contains no credit for its creator (AI?): Louis Theroux with Harrison ‘HSTikkyTokky’ Sullivan in a documentary that explores the force that not only draws men into debasing themselves and others for money, but women such as Bonnie Blue.

The pond regrets that the dog botherer started out by mentioning his sons because it reminded the pond of an admirable outburst by one of them, now in Junkee's archives...

,,,Chris Kenny is my dad. On one of the Sky News political analysis programs he hosts, he has replied to the Chaser joke, lamenting that if his children were ever to Google his name in the future, this is the kind of filth we would stumble across.
Heaven forbid.
Kenny is a staunchly neo-conservative, anti-progress, anti-worker defender of the status quo. He is an unrelenting apologist for the Liberal Party. He was one of Alexander Downer’s senior advisers at the time of the Iraq War. He’s been known to argue for stubborn, sightless inaction on climate change. He spits at anyone concerned with such trivialities as gender equality, environmental issues or labour rights from his Twitter account on a daily basis. Recently, he characterised criticism of the lack of women in Tony Abbott’s Cabinet as a continuation of the Left’s “gender wars”. He is a regular and fervent participant in The Australian’s numerous ongoing bully campaigns against those who question its editorial practices and ideological biases. The profoundly irresponsible, dishonest, hate-filled anti-multiculturalist Andrew Bolt has recently referred to Kenny on his blog as “a friend”.
And it’s a jokey picture of a bestial embrace that I should be afraid of discovering online?

Sorry, that never gets old for the pond ...

Louis Theroux’s documentary Inside the Manosphere was my first venture into this world of toxic masculinity. It was at once disturbing and laughable.
Disturbing because this cesspit of ignorance, misogyny, antisemitism and violence is being piped around cyberspace into the formative spaces of our teenage children. Laughable because what is being passed off as masculinity is, in fact, immaturity. It is boyhood on steroids, bravado without wisdom, ego without self-awareness, and muscularity without compassion or respect.
Inane, materialistic and shallow, this social media phenomenon may be helping to shape the views of millions of impressionable teenage boys. Even worse, it mirrors and feeds off a grotesque view of womanhood promoted by Bonnie Blue and others in the OnlyFans world.
In the enlightened world of Western liberal democracies, in countries of unprecedented wealth and knowledge, we are seeing a digital retreat to the priorities of the cave dwellers, where nothing matters beyond the law of the jungle, where might overpowers right and greed sweeps aside human dignity. The serious question posed by many is what this tells us about modern masculinity.

Here the pond should disclose that the pond has seen the Theroux documentary, which is pretty typical Theroux and done in his usual style (the pond enjoyed his one on Scientology more).

It doesn't reveal anything new to anyone who has spent any time tracking the toxic outposts of extreme far right thinking in the USA...

What's remarkable is how out of touch the dog botherer manages to sound, but that's probably because he only exists in a lizard Oz/Sky Noise down under (still no rebrand?) bubble.

Amazingly, the reptiles actually provided a link to this Instagram, but as clicks only encourage the beast, and as you have to give up either your email or your Facebook or some other way to feed the machine, the pond won't be following suit, and instead just offers a screen cap:

It's a measure of how desperate the reptiles have become that they provided a link which offered a way out of the hive mind.

To its sorrow, the pond was stuck with the dog botherer:

For me, as the father of four sons, this topic is personal and imperative. My first two are now men in their 30s; digital natives who graduated to adulthood, thankfully, before the influence of social media was strong (it was one of my older sons who put me on to this film). Soon my younger boys will need to navigate a complex digital world populated by the toxic manosphere and other insidious influences.
Many boys their age around the world are following the likes of Andrew Tate, Harrison “HSTikkyTokky” Sullivan, Justin Waller, Myron Gaines and “Sneako”. What they get are demeaning and brutal depictions of women, sex and relationships, as well as conspiracy theories about satanists and Jews running the world.
They also receive affirmation that their red pill* awareness allows them to see through mainstream information. And it is all gift-wrapped in crass materialism. (*Derived from the movie Matrix, apparently, where a red pill delivers such awareness.)

The reptiles interrupted with memories of ancient times, Stills from a YouTube video created by Nathan Pope that criticises influencer Andrew Tate. (Sic, so far as the pond could see, there was only one still, with no signs of a gallery, and natch without any link to YouTube content)

Theroux's documentary is already out of date.

And even the most recent trend has been and gone - see Will Gottsegen's piece in The Atlantic, What Was Clavicular? The internet’s most famous looks-maxxer is far more pernicious than he may seem. (*intermittent archive link)

The point of course is that all this is more than extreme far right adjacent. It's the full quid ...

...Clavicular’s rise is pernicious. The baseline concern with an influencer who takes a hammer to his face and says hateful things is that he is in some sense encouraging other people to do the same. Last month, a couple of fans came up to him during a livestream, and one shouted “Heil Hitler.” Clavicular tried to dismiss the comments as “cringe,” but he quite obviously set the tone. I have some authority here: After I left a note outside his parents’ house requesting an interview for this story, Clavicular shared my contact information online. As a reporter who covers the internet, I am used to being harassed—but I had never experienced so many direct violent threats, and so much virulent anti-Semitic hatred, as I have since then. The looks-maxxer insult “subhuman” kept coming up, as did the word mongrel. (A spokesperson for Clavicular declined to answer my questions.)
The bigger concern with Clavicular is not that he is encouraging a generation of young men to take extreme measures to change their looks. It’s that because his antics are so ridiculous and his videos so entertaining to a certain crowd, he has allowed more coherent and dangerous ideologies to hitch a ride on his movement. The far-right manosphere has seemingly taken every opportunity it can to tie itself to Clavicular. Tate joined him on a stream last month to lift weights and offer advice about how Clav should handle his newfound fame. Jon Zherka, an adjacent influencer, recently likened him to a “younger brother.” Last week, Fuentes called him a “prophet” for exposing the cynical reality of modern dating—a core part of Clavicular’s appeal among this group.

Well yes, and that's why the pond erupted with laughter at this dog bothering line ...

A Guardian review of this documentary suggested the manosphere was all old news. Yet while I had read references to Tate and the manosphere before I had not seen any of it, so all this was new to me.

FFS, talk about completely clueless ...

This is your world ... this is the bromancer pumped up, fully jacked up like Dwayne Johnson in The Smashing Machine ...

This is Faux Noise, Murdochian fantasy land pushed to its obvious outcome ...

Theroux’s examination of this social media microclimate likely will be the first exposure for millions of parents, which can only be a good thing.
Driven by the monetisation of social media followings, these macho influencers seek to humiliate others, sometimes obscenely dressing up their stunts as campaigns for moral rectitude; for instance, condemning the online promiscuity of OnlyFans women while deliberately exploiting their online “clout”. This highlights an age-old hypocrisy as they boast about male “body counts” while trashing women for similar behaviour.
Their online posts can resort to violence – anything to generate clicks under the guise of “coaching boys how to be f--king boys, not soy boys or gimps”. The claimed ideological motivation of reclaiming clearly delineated gender roles of the past is revealed as a ploy rather than a philosophy – the only true motivation for these influencers is money, anything to amass the wealth they love to display.

At that point, another example of detachment from what's going down popped up courtesy of unlovely meter maid Rita ... (still no rebrand?)

Sky News host Rita Panahi is shocked by Matt Walsh’s comments after OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky’s death. “The billionaire owner of OnlyFans, Leonid Radvinsky, died earlier this week after a very private battle with cancer,” Ms Panahi said. “Matt Walsh slammed Radvinsky. “He said that the man dedicated his life to peddling smut and poison. Now he's dead, and his only legacy on this Earth is filth. What a waste of existence.”

Please, catch up ...

It's what passes for civil discourse in the world of Rambo ...

And yet the dog botherer stayed completely clueless...

Yet their pursuit of cash pollutes the minds of the impressionable. “Most women in the world are not like my mum,” Sullivan says after being challenged by his mother, Elaine. “Most are thick.”
“Call me racist, call my misogynist, call me homophobic, call me a scammer, I’m all those things,” Sullivan says. But none of this matters, he says; it is all “clip-farming”. Pinned by Theroux to stand by a declaration he would disown a gay son, Sullivan says, “That’s not homophobic.” And his clips saying “F--k the Jews” gets a similar dismissal: “Does that mean I’m antisemitic? No.”
War is peace. Ignorance is strength.
Sullivan feigns concern about kids as young as 13 watching his clips but he shuns responsibility. “That’s the parent’s fault; that’s not my fault.”

By this point, the dog botherer had begun to sound seriously snowflake, completely wet, someone who spends too much time watching the ABC, or even worse ... Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller in Adolescence, a drama designed to raise awareness about boys going to dark places on the internet. Picture: Netflix

Come on man, stay strong, be hard, get a grip ... remember this is your world, this is the bromancer's Xian state in action ...

The dog botherer began to sound like he was having some kind of anxiety attack ...

For all the technological know-how, you get the sense we are hearing from people a stage or two back in evolution. “It got called toxic,” Justin Waller says, explaining his take on the demise of masculinity. “And you mix that with feminism, we’ve asked women to become men, you know men build, invent and maintain society, that’s a fact you know.”
Theroux’s documentary is compulsory viewing and exemplary filmmaking. He draws conclusions eventually, but his method is weighted towards introducing his subjects, gently prodding and allowing them to reveal themselves – enough rope.
Last year the fictional drama Adolescence drew global attention to the potential psychological and physical harm generated by the manosphere and its social media influencers. Teenage boys are being encouraged to channel their adolescent insecurities and curiosities into a hateful version of masculinity that objectifies and resents women.
There is nothing new, sadly, about violence against women, crimes of jealousy, date rape or bullying. The salient question is whether social media influencers are intensifying these tendencies and normalising such behaviour.
Does the primitive bile they spread not only take teenage boys down an antisocial path but also expose young women to increased risk of sexual violence and mistreatment? The answer is obvious, one must beget the other.

At this point the reptiles tried another flourish of relevance ..

It was an actual working link to the trailer on YouTube ...

It was as if all that talk about attitudes to women was some kind of dreaming ... as if the dog botherer was completely unaware of the smashing machine, where men and women smash each other sh*tless, or where they pound their faces sh*tless in the quest for beauty (google bot approved)

Is the dog botherer completely unaware that a UFC event is being promoted in the White House grounds to celebrate 250 years?

Apparently he is...

The characters Theroux introduces proudly promote “one-way monogamy” where their “wives” must remain faithful while husbands pursue other women and even bring them home to the marital bed.
“I’ll show them a picture of Kristen (his wife) immediately,” Waller says about his dating exploits, “and go straight for the threesome.”
In the manosphere women are shamed as dumb and innately dishonest by men with underdeveloped cerebrums and overblown biceps. These blokes make millions of dollars and live in fancy apartments with full garages and empty bookshelves.
They idolise Donald Trump, and the US President dips his lid to their audiences. In their endless, vapid and offensive posts, racism rears its head, especially the worst kind of conspiratorial antisemitism.

At last, some recognition ... this is what Faux Noise has given unto the world ...

 

Delusions of grandeur ...

Still, in a way, this documentary is reassuring. Sure, it exposes an evil influence, another pocket of social media we need to be wary of so we can help our children avoid it or make the right judgments about it.
This underscores why the Albanese government’s world-leading teenage social media ban has such widespread support. The aims of the ban are almost universally supported, even if we doubt the effectiveness of mere laws to protect our children.

Perhaps also the nationalisation of News Corp in Australia?

The pond keeds, it keeds ...

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has recorded a video message for Australian teenagers, calling on them to make the most of the social media ban. The video will be played in classrooms across the country this week, ahead of the social media ban, which comes into effect on Wednesday. “Make the most of the school holidays coming up … spend quality time with your friends and your family, face to face,” Mr Albanese said.

The dog botherer kept trying to cope ...

The reassuring aspect of Theroux’s examination is that this is all we are dealing with, a dark corner of social media, not a realignment of gender relations or a serious philosophical movement. It is a parasitic industry that seeks to profit from selling old prejudices in contemporary ways to young minds.
The manosphere influencers have nothing to say about real masculinity. In fact, they reflect its antithesis; they are examples of what we get when true masculinity goes missing.
As Theroux teases out, these charlatans are sad cases who seem to have lacked proper male role models of their own. They have the minds and morals of confused boys, trapped in the bodies of men.
Study after study across Western liberal democracies shows that without fathers or strong male role models, young men are more inclined to fail on many levels. The manosphere influencers are not failing financially but they are failing at life and looking to take others with them.
Waller proudly boasts that he will not bathe his daughter or change her nappy. These infantile beasts know nothing about being a real man.
Greed drives them to share extreme behaviour in search of money, and young minds idolise their superficial success. It is the instant fame and fortune of the social media world that is the problem here, not any philosophical journey.
The same force that entices Blue to boast she had sex with more than 1000 men in a day also draws these men into debasing themselves and others for money.
Bad people have always done horrible things, but social media amplifies their exploits and distorts their imaginations.

At this point the reptiles offered up the most wretched AI image to accompany the caption, Almost seven in 10 Australian men aged 16-25 are regularly engaging with masculinity influencers, according to a study from The Movember Institute of Men’s Health. Picture: Getty Images

It might have been handier to note that AI distortions can work both ways ...

And so to final thoughts ...

The answer for our young people must be in real relationships with real men and women. Mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, teachers and coaches, the sort of people most of us were fortunate to grow up around, and with whom we try to surround our children now.
Nothing, probably not even the government’s social media ban, can prevent our children from encountering the worst aspects of social media’s brainless digital sewer. But if they are surrounded by properly functioning adults, in real and loving relationships, we can hope to arm them with the intelligence and sense to resist these putrid enticements.
Perhaps it comes back to the simple point of respect, a quality all too lacking in many aspects of modern society. Respect is more important than money or fame – respect is what we should want for ourselves, those we care about and most everyone else. Respect for women, men and for ourselves. The digital world dispenses with respect in favour of fame, which is why we need organic relationships to keep respect in pride of place.
Masculinity undoubtedly involves strength, sure. But also empathy. It demands courage but also compassion. The less we see of these attributes in the digital world, perhaps the more we need to embrace and display them in the real world.

Yeah, yeah, talk to the News Corp, white Xian nationalist bromancer hand ...

Put it another way ...

And now, before proceeding to the Ughmann - the pond doesn't like it, but it has to be done - a note on the ongoing campaigning about renewables...

Luckily the intermittent archive was working this day ...(no guarantees)

EXCLUSIVE

‘We’re the guinea pigs’: fury at shocking scale of green energy dream
Inside the massive Central West Orana renewable energy zone stands a memorial so macabre even the Greens protested. Locals say it’s just the start.
By Christine Middap

INQUIRER
Why plug-in hybrids are a costly mistake for most Australian drivers
Car tech sold as a happy medium between petrol and electric has a dirty secret.
By Stephen Corby

Once again the reptiles diligently worked to ensure that Australia had no way of coping with current and future oil shocks ... but it was Stephen Corby that particularly got the pond's EV goat with this summary:

...So what is the answer, and are you supposed to just buy a good old new petrol-burning car and let the manufacturer suck up the fines? Well, yes, if you’re a particular kind of motoring enthusiast and you demand performance, loud noises and fun from your car.
But the sensible choice, I’m afraid, is still a hybrid, just not a plug-in one. I call them dumb-dumb hybrids; the kind driven by almost every Uber driver with whom you’ve ever shared an overly perfumed car interior.
Toyota (which I believe is a Japanese word meaning sensible, or an antonym for exciting) is the brand most famous for using a hybrid technology known as “parallel” in most of the cars in its busy showrooms, including the Camry, Corolla and RAV4.
In these hybrids, the magic simply happens without the driver having to do, or think about, anything differently.

Um, no. The sensible choice is a straight EV, and even more sensible, avoid Toyota, which plunged big into denying EVs were a thing, or would ever become a thing, and went hybrid, and were left standing by the Chinese-government EV revolution.

The magic of driving past petrol stations at the moment is magical (though the pond will admit that having conversations with extended family members who persisted in driving diesel can be a bit strained).

Why did the pond get agitated? Because Steve himself belled the cat earlier in his piece:

...Not long ago, I borrowed a Hyundai Kona EV for six months and, by becoming a sun worshipper, I managed to run it for that entire time at effectively zero cost (as long as we don’t discuss the price of my solar panels and EV charger).
This required me to be slightly anally retentive about when I charged it, and I’m entirely sure that if it were my own car I just would have lazily plugged it in overnight at times and paid the bill, but because there was a story in it I was fastidious.
And because we were using the Kona very much as a second car (my wife wanted to buy it in the end, but I pointed to around 50,000 reasons with a dollar sign in front of them why we would not), and it was regularly delivering more than 400km off a charge, I would often go more than a week without having to charge it at all.
And here’s another piece of practical advice: EVs – at this point and with our limited, and limiting, charging infrastructure – make an excellent second car. Anyone buying an EV as their one and only family vehicle is being what I would call “brave”, in the same way Sir Humphrey Appleby used that term on Yes Minister.

There you go, typical mansplaining, with the EV only suitable for the wifey, a line straight out of the manosphere, despite the dog botherer telling the pond that sort of attitude was problematic.

Trust Steve's wife, and look around and there are plenty of cheaper and better cars than Kona to be found (and the pond says that having had a Kona in the house for several years), and forget all the blather about range anxiety, unless you happen to drive to Broken Hill every alternate weekend.

And no paddles are to hand to get you out of paddling up sh*t creek to a manosphere cave (*google bot safe)

And so to this day's final offering.

The pond could have turned to grating, garrulous Gemma, or to "Ned", rabbiting on about Pauline yet again, but there's nothing like the Ughmann, unreformed seminarian and climate science denialist ... especially as he was the one featured at the top of the lizard Oz early in the weekend ...

The header: Stagflation’s return: the wolf at Australia’s energy door; Stagflation now looms over suburban Australia, yet there is a question almost no one in government or the bureaucracy seems willing to ask.

The spot for the place where a caption would have accompanied the astonishing opening illustration, but for some reason, no credit was given, and so the creator (AI?) of this amazing artwork went uncredited.

Okay, the pond admits it. It's too much.

The bromancer, the dog botherer and the Ughmann? It's worse than a bad joke walking into a pub, and this pint takes a bigly seven minutes to swill.

But what choice does the pond have?

Now stand by for undiluted Ughmann, and in the usual way, he begins by reverting to ancient times and his life in the Catholic system:

In February 1977 the new economics teacher at Marist College in Canberra decided to make a dramatic entry.
He strode into the fifth form classroom, picked up the chalk and scrawled one word in capitals across the top of the board: stagflation.
He underlined it and turned to explain. This was a new economic concept, designed to describe our times, when high inflation and high unemployment collided. The word was an inelegant blend of stagnation and inflation, and it was a child of the 70s oil shocks.
Why?
Because oil was not just another commodity. It was the master resource that made and moved economies. When the flow of oil was constricted, the price surged and raised the cost of almost everything at once: transport, manufacturing, farming, plastics and food. Prices rose everywhere because the cost of the lifeblood of the modern world had spiked, and the shock ran down every artery and vein.
The constriction of oil supply also slowed the world’s heartbeat. Households had less money to spend after filling the car and paying the bills. Businesses faced rising costs, shrinking margins and weaker demand. Investment stalled, production slowed and jobs were lost.
Economists had long assumed there was a trade-off between inflation and unemployment, captured in a neat model called the Phillips curve. The oil crisis delivered both together. Growth weakened, unemployment rose and inflation surged. The real world broke the model, as it so often does.
Everything old is new again
With the third Gulf war raging, everything old is new again and a word not discussed outside universities in nearly a half-century is coming back into vogue. The threat is real. The toxic cocktail that could breathe stagflation back into being is being mixed again.
Jim Chalmers did not invoke the term in his speech to business economists this week but all the elements were there.
The Treasurer told the audience the oil price was up 80 per cent since the start of the war, “adding upward pressure to global inflation, interest rate expectations and bond yields, while international equity markets and sentiment more broadly have fallen”.
“It means the prospect of inflation peaking in the high 4s or even higher this year is very real,” he said.
The world’s economic heartbeat is slowing and Australia’s already anaemic growth will weaken further. The longer the oil clot lingers, the greater the damage.
“Treasury estimates that GDP would be 0.6 per cent lower in 2027 and even by 2029 would still be below where it would have been without the conflict,” Chalmers said.

The pond has done enough interrupting, so here's the Sky Noise down under interruption (still no rebranding?)

Independent analyst Evan Lucas warned Sky News has warned that Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ inflation prediction may be an underestimation. Mr Lucas predicts that “a 6-7 per cent headline inflation figure is definitely on the cards”. “The replenishment isn't there at the levels we need to see it,” he told Sky News Australia. “The cost of fuel in the March read will be astonishing”.

The pond swooned at the astonishing artwork, as the Ughmann carried on ...

On a flying visit to Australia, International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol warned world leaders had yet to grasp the scale of the damage done to the “vital arteries of the global economy”.

Here the pond must note another astonishing attempt at relevance, with the reptiles inserting a link to this tweet ...

Presumably some stayed at X to romp with Elon, but the pond ploughed on ...because there's something curiously appealing in the Ughmann's doom-saying, fear-mongering scribbling ...

Why this time is worse
Birol says his agency calculates that the shock from the Gulf war outstrips the twin oil crises of the 1970s, combined with a cut to gas supplies bigger than the one that followed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The world has lost about 11 million barrels of oil a day, roughly one in every 10 it consumes. And 140 billion cubic metres of gas have evaporated, the equivalent of stripping a major industrial economy’s entire supply out of the global system.
Some of the damage is structural because, in its fight to survive, Iran has bombarded the energy assets of its neighbours. More than 40 oilfields, gas plants and export terminals across the region have been hit.
Even if there were a swift end to the third Gulf war, the world is a long way from turning its oil and gas tap back to anything approaching normal.

And yet all this was Emeritus Chairman approved and encouraged ... Plumes of smoke and fire rise after debris from an intercepted Iranian drone struck an oil facility, in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, on March 14, 2026. Picture: AP

Of course the Ughmann seized the chance to celebrate oil and gas, and to downgrade any idle chat about renewables, EVs and such like ...

Despite the military dominance of the US and Israel, the choke point of the Strait of Hormuz is effectively controlled by Iran. Trade through that waterway now depends on what the bloodied, battered but still unbowed theocratic regime will allow. Even if an agreement to open it were reached tomorrow, trade would take months to normalise.
But you cannot export oil and gas you do not have.
The Economist reported this week that Brent crude, at $US112 a barrel, is 54 per cent higher than before hostilities began. Gas prices in Europe are up by 85 per cent and the damage will not end when the shootingstops. Ships are in the wrong place, insurance has been shredded, production has been cut and refineries that have gone idle cannot be flicked back on like a light switch.
Why recovery will take years
Restoring energy flows is a long industrial relay. Gulf producers must bring damaged or idled output back online. Tankers must be willing and able to return. Refiners in Asia and elsewhere must restart plants that have been starved of crude. None of that happens quickly. Some liquefied natural gas plants, such as Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex, will take years to recover. Even under the best case, The Economist says it could take around four months for markets to regain some semblance of normality.

Another example of the fine work by King Donald, as approved and encouraged by the Emeritus Chairman ... Qatar Ras Laffan complex has been heavily targeted by Iran and will take years to recover. Picture: @sentdefender/X

Now let's hear it for oil and gas ...

Each day Australia wakes up to the reality that oil and gas do far more work in our economy than most people realise. Rising costs are already feeding through to everyday goods. Building materials are climbing sharply as the price of oil-based goods rises. The spike in transport and production costs are moving through the food chain and that will soon be felt at the checkout.
That is how a war in the Gulf turns up in suburban Australia. Not just at the bowser but in the cost of building a home, fixing a pipe or filling a shopping trolley. Hydrocarbons are everywhere; if they do not help make a good, they move it. When their supply is choked, inflation spreads like wildfire.
The pain could get a lot worse. The biggest risk is that the steady flow of more than two vast oil tankers a day is interrupted. If that happens, Australia would be forced into fuel rationing, as others already have. So far the chain has held but the links are straining and the longer the crisis lasts the greater the risks that one will break.
It is worth repeating that it is a national disgrace that a generation of politicians, of all colours, has allowed this country to reach a point where 90 per cent of its liquid fuel is imported. Worse, they assumed the supply lines would never fail and allowed fuel reserves to fall to barely a month’s cover. That is not misfortune. It is an abject policy failure.
We were warned.

And here's what King Donald, with the approval of the Emeritus Chairman, has achieved ... Bulk Carrier Belray near the Strait of Hormuz, March 22, 2026. This critical choke point, now effectively controlled by Iran, poses a significant threat to world energy supplies and leaves Australia’s fuel security exposed. Picture: Getty

Now stand by for more tedious memories ...

We were told this would be fixed
When I left the ABC in 2017, the first story I filed as political editor for Nine News was that Australia was in breach of its obligations to the International Energy Agency to hold 90 days of fuel reserves. My new bosses were a bit bemused by my energy obsession but they humoured me.
I don’t claim credit for the insight. I was persuaded by the argument of a man I had come to know well, former fighter pilot and retired air vice-marshal John Blackburn.
In 2014, Blackburn wrote a report for the NRMA warning that Australia’s fuel reserves were running on empty. This fossil-fuel rich island nation had lost the capacity to produce and refine its own fuel. We had become dangerously dependent on imports, with reserves so thin we were counting tankers at sea as part of our stockpile.
Then, as now, 90 per cent of the liquid fuel that keeps this country running came from overseas. We were told the problem would be fixed by 2026. Clearly, it wasn’t.
Coalition and Labor governments have tinkered at the edges of a solution because the real fix was too expensive, too difficult or too politically inconvenient. The threat always seemed so distant. Now the wolf is at the door.
When the smoke clears, the world will reorder its energy priorities, just as it did in the 1970s. Energy security will again become the central concern of governments everywhere.
The danger for Australia is that we learn the wrong lesson and waste this crisis. The early signs are disturbing.

You mean, get off oil and gas, turn to solar and wind turbines and other forms of renewable energy? Not on your Ughmann nelly ... The Gulf war’s impact reaches suburban Australia, not just at the bowser. Picture: Getty

Time to double down on the addiction, time to embrace the disease and forget the cure ...

The response now taking shape is to double down on an electricity system built on intermittent generation, backed by storage, in the belief that electrifying everything will deliver security. It will not. It risks replacing one vulnerability with another and building a single point of failure into the nation’s operating system.
If that system fails, everything fails with it. And maybe the people who are building this system should ponder whether it is wise that so many of the components in its nervous system are made in China.
The big choice facing Australia now
There is a question almost no one in government or the bureaucracy seems willing to ask. What is the relationship between the kind of energy an economy uses and the productivity it can sustain?
For two centuries growth has been built on dense, reliable energy, first coal, then oil and gas. Now we are shifting towards sources that are diffuse and intermittent, and compensating with vast spending on storage, transmission and backup. That makes the system more complex, more expensive and less predictable.
Is it just coincidence that as this transition has gathered pace, productivity has stalled and costs have risen? Or is there a link we are refusing to confront?
Australia has a choice. It can use the advantages it has in coal, gas, uranium and, potentially, oil or it can squander them.
Yes, the world will become more efficient. Yes, more vehicles will be electric.
And yes, there is an opportunity to expand the mining of the critical minerals that underpin that shift.
But the immediate reality is that the world still runs on hydrocarbons and will for decades to come. With major suppliers of oil and gas shut down there is a clear opportunity for Australia to fill the gap, to strengthen our own economy, and to build security and resilience against future shocks.
We should be producing more energy, not less. We should be expanding exports of coal, LNG and uranium. We should be building nuclear power plants. We should be exploring for oil and developing the capacity to turn coal and gas into liquid fuels.
Above all, we should ensure that this country never again finds itself so exposed.
The lesson is not complicated. The world runs on the dense energy of oil, coal and gas. Ignore that, and the real world will blow up your operating model.
I was a bad student, but Les Roberts was a good teacher. I’d like him to know that, in at least one lesson, I was paying attention.

The Ughmann might think he was paying attention, but he's as completely clueless as the dog botherer and the bromancer, as they drove to the bar...

Now here's what the pond would have liked to be writing about ...

We’ve Stopped Noticing That Trump’s Cabinet Meetings Are Completely Insane

Inter alia...

Here is a partial list of subjects covered by the President of the United States at Thursday’s cabinet meeting:
The obliteration of Iran’s navy. The TSA shutdown. A woman killed in Chicago. The Federal Reserve building renovation. The cost of Sharpie pens. Venezuelan oil revenue. King Charles’s cancer. Gavin Newsom’s self-reported learning disability. Cognitive tests. SCOTUS. The Kennedy Center. California high-speed rail. NATO’s failure to send ships. A thousand-dollar pen that didn’t write. The prime minister of the United Kingdom. Caravans. Sanctuary cities.  The 25th Amendment. A joint venture with Venezuela. Drug smugglers who don’t watch television.
That was one meeting. Ninety-eight minutes. A wartime cabinet briefing.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: if a transcript from this meeting came from the government of Brazil — or Hungary, or any country we cover from a comfortable critical distance — we would not file it as a cabinet meeting. We would write about it as a document. We would ask what it reveals about the man producing it and the institution that has formed around him. We would use different words.
But we don’t use different words for Trump. We stopped a long time ago, so gradually that I’m not sure anyone made a conscious decision to stop. It just became the way the job gets done.

And again ...

Trump Spends Over 5 Minutes on the Cost of Sharpie Pens in Bizarre Cabinet Meeting Riff

And in that spirit ...

And in the dog botherer spirit let's hear it for the women doing their best to look good for the bros ...