In which, after celebrating King Chook with the bromancer, the pond does a reptile survey, and somehow ends up with in the spirit of the Dardanelles season ...

 

The pond was surprised to learn, via the Graudian and Graham Readfearn that the war criminal network (7) had joined the lizard Oz war against EVs and renewables, in Channel Seven's Spotlight dug for dirt on renewable energy. Here's what they left out.

The pond was surprised because it suddenly remembered that there were still four FTA networks in Australia, and that the Seven network actually still existed. 

The pond can't recall watching a single show or even five minutes of Seven the last couple of decades, helped by not giving a toss about the AFL. 

When ever in Melbourne, the pond stares blankly into the distance when asked what team it supports, and ABC news updates (many bulletins are in the grip of that spreader of brain damage and dementia) are enough to be able to mock members of the extended family devoted to losers like Richmond.

As for Ten, it takes the pond fever dream moments to remember decades of drivel of the Number 96 kind, with the pond unable to recall the name of a single show since.

And about Nine the pond says nothing, save to note that they've helped in the ruination of Australian media in multiple ways. Long gone are the days when Paul Sheehan could wax prolix pretending to be a prole while enjoying ten buck sourdough bread in Paddington.

As for that war, Wilcox managed to leave out one important empty box in her 'toon of the day...

Where's the empty "invisible thing" box for "benefits to the planet flowing from addiction to fossil fuels"?

Never mind, the pond appreciates news of what's going down in declining empires, even if there's no real need to care.

After all, the pond has the mother lode of the axis of weevils in the shape of the lizard Oz hive mind, and its nefarious offshoots, with occasional second hand insights turning up to reveal what Sky Noise down under is doing to degrade the hive mind even further.

And so to the latest news, and to the bromancer advising on mad King Donald's mindless middle east folly, set in progress with the aid and encouragement of the bromancer's employer, the Emeritus Chairman, and cheered on by the bromancer's Faux Noise US kissing cousins ...

Poor bromancer ...or should that be poor world?

The header: Is this the ultimate presidential TACO? Donald Trump faces a military stalemate with Iran as his repeated threats lose credibility and Tehran refuses to negotiate under pressure.

The caption for the dire collage celebrating the return of Emilia, at last given a credit for her ongoing demeaning of the graphics department: Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei and President Donald Trump both want the war to end but neither wants to be seen as having come off second best. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

It's a peculiar, perverse pleasure, watching the bromancer showing every sign of being up for a turning. 

It only takes three minutes of his time, and anything he talks about might well change in a nanosecond, but he's growing more and more testy with mad King Donald, with the latest his throwing about of that key sign of TDS, talk of King Donald as a weak-willed chook.

The bromancer cunningly poses it a question - he's just asking questions - but the weight falls on signs of chookdom. My chookdom for a Taco sauce:

Is this the ultimate TACO? Donald Trump chickened out from enforcing his umpteenth deadline for Iran to comply with his wishes by reopening the Strait of Hormuz and surrendering its 60 per cent enriched uranium stockpile.
Or is the US President preparing one last, massive military escalation?
The more extravagant Trump’s threats, the less likely he is to carry them out.
Thus, there was no chance that Trump would act to “end the civilisation” of Iran through massive bombing. This language offended Americans, outraged world opinion and drew a rebuke from Pope Leo XIV.

By golly, he's taken to listing mad King Donald's assorted crimes, and speaking of second hand news of that remote Sky Noise down under empire, the bromancer's piece was instantly interrupted by by the reptiles flinging in an AV distraction (how's that rebrand going?):

FDD Iran analyst Janatan Sayeh claims US President Donald Trump sees the next phase in the Iran war as being “even more catastrophic, going beyond just military”. “He sees the next phase as being even more catastrophic, going beyond just military and going after somehow using something from within Iranian territory against the regime,” he told Sky News host James Bolt. “That’s the only way they can meaningfully ensure that in the long term, at least you’re not just dealing with a wounded Islamic Republic and you’re not going back every six months to a year, bombing the regime, treating then bombing them again.”

Slurp down the bromancer's discontent while you can - it seems generations ago that he was hot to trot for a war with China by Xmas; now he's riven by fearsome doubting Thomas insights and billy goat butts:

But Trump has attacked militarily at the least likely times, such as during formal negotiations.
The uneasy balance is that Washington maintains the blockade of Iranian ports, while Iran blockades the Strait of Hormuz to all other shipping.
The President has extended the ceasefire indefinitely, allegedly at the request of the Pakistani government, which brokered US-Iran talks, and to allow what he describes as a “seriously fractured” Iranian government to present a consolidated position.
Iran says it has no intention of resuming talks under a deadline and accuses the US of plotting to launch another surprise attack.
The war has already gone on for eight weeks.
Trump keeps managing to talk the markets into believing it’s just about to end.
But this stage of negotiations has so far favoured Iran. It got a ceasefire, the suspension of the US and Israeli bombing campaign, and it got Trump to order Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to suspend military operations in Lebanon.
Tehran has used the pause to dig out buried missile launchers, missiles and drones. Estimates vary widely but there is significant Western and US briefing that Iran has more than 1000 missiles left, some 40 per cent of its pre-war drones and maybe 60 per cent of its missile launchers.
If these figures are remotely accurate, they show that Trump’s claims of damage to Iran’s war stocks have been seriously exaggerated.
It also means Iran may well be capable of renewed and even sustained attacks on Gulf Arab energy infrastructure, as well as on Israel and other targets.
Iran may have other ways of escalating the conflict, such as getting some of its proxies, Shia militia in Arab nations as well as the Houthis in Yemen, to attack regional energy infrastructure or ships sailing in the Red Sea.

The one indicator that this might not be a TACO moment is that Trump has brought a third aircraft carrier to the region as well as thousands of marines and amphibious troops.

The reptiles again interrupted, and again the pond reduced the distraction to a screen cap: U.S. forces operating in the Arabian Sea enforced naval blockade measures against an Iranian-flagged cargo vessel attempting to sail toward an Iranian port, April 19

Could the bromancer top his usual preferred dismissive "that's nuts"?

Trump plainly wants to avoid this, just as Iran wants to avoid the resumption of US and Israeli bombing of Iranian targets. So the fragile, unstable, temporary balance of the twin embargoes may be the way of things for a while.
The embargo is costing Iran hundreds of millions of dollars a day, in an economy already on its knees.
But Iran has stockpiled supplies, has some oil at sea, can do some trade overland, and has some arrangements with international supporters such as Russia, China and North Korea.
Indeed, the fact Russia and China have blatantly helped Iran, militarily and economically, and yet paid no price for this, has weakened US standing vis a vis the other great powers.
Trump now wants to finish the war quickly. It’s likely that Iran will ultimately offer some kind of fudge/compromise/deal on its nuclear materials.
But it will want massive sanctions relief in return.
It’s very unclear that Iran will allow the free passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
It was for many years a standing risk in all geostrategic calculations that Iran may seek one day to shut off the Strait.
It didn’t do this mainly because it feared massive US retaliation.
Now it has already suffered the massive American retaliation, so it’s going to be very reluctant to give up its colossal new leverage.
If Iran can survive a blockade for six months, and that, like everything else, is very uncertain, Trump surely cannot continue this war, which is so unpopular among ordinary Americans, and so costly and disruptive, for six months.
Trump has so devalued his own word that it now bears almost no relationship to reality, or perhaps an inverse relationship.
For example, in 2018 Trump announced that North Korea would give up all its nuclear weapons. No such thing happened.
After an Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin, Trump announced he’d solved the Ukraine war.
Utter nonsense. None of the peace agreement provisions Trump announced for the Gaza Strip has come to fruition.
And during this war Trump entirely reverses narrative on average twice a day.
The Iranians know Trump now very much wants out of this war, so the US President must do something highly unusual for him – play a weak hand brilliantly.

Well, it ain't talk of "nuts", or even mad King Donald, emperor of bone spurs boasting that he would have won the Vietnam war in a week or two, but the pond will settle for "Utter nonsense" as a sign of the bromancer's ongoing disenchantment with the mad king...

After that it was all down hill.

The pond noted a few days ago that the reptiles seem to live in a distant past populated by long lost figures of the Jim Cairns kind.

This day Geoff chambered another round by reminding the pond of a politician now wreathed in memories like a Network Ten show.

Luckily the intermittent archive is working, so the pond had only to pause to note what appalling snap the reptiles had managed to feature at the head of Geoff's outburst.

Doesn't she look like a demented gesticulating harridan, a mad witch? Is the parrot standing by with a chaff bag to help out Geoff? First the link, then the teaser trailer:

Only Labor can fix up Julia Gillard’s NDIS mess
Labor faces a high-stakes gamble as it prepares to slash $15bn from the disability scheme’s costs by removing participants the scheme was never designed to support.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Enough of that already ...

And it's a ritual of the pond's never to give petulant Peta the time of day, though there was a whimsical desire to return to ancient days in her headline ...

Where are adults to save us? Howard and Costello took our debt to zero
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

This government has fostered the growth of productivity-smashing union power that has made new resource projects almost impossible.

Sheesh, they're still banging on about long lost picket fence days?

They're still dragging Petey boy on to Sky Noise down under to offer useless advice, even though the pond can vaguely remember - it's so long ago - that he never had the ticker?

And just look at the fossils featured in the snap at the top of her piece, and marvel that she didn't tip the nod to the onion muncher, now at a loose end as his authoritarian Hungary holidays come to an end ...

And that's more than enough of that.

Meanwhile, as the pond was speaking only yesterday about the reptiles ongoing devotion to jihads, the pond should note this effort by over boiled rice...

Yep, it's one of their hysterical patented EXCLUSIVES for a world that just doesn't care ...(be a loyal plastic robot, TV dinners by the pool, brown shoes don't make it - oh Frank, Frank, why did you zap the pond with political incorrectness?)

EXCLUSIVE
Medical regulator ‘captured’ by powerful trans lobby
Peak medical regulator ‘compromised’ by partnership with trans lobby group
AHPRA faces explosive claims it has been compromised by its partnership with trans lobby group ACON, with doctors now ‘too scared to dissent’ on gender treatments.
By Stephen Rice

Transphobia is one of the least appealing aspects of the hive mind, and one of the more pathetic jihads the pond always tries to avoid, as it gets the pond's TG friends agitated (has anyone in the hive mind ever met a TG person? There aren't that many out and about, for all the demonising and the hysteria).

It puts the reptiles in the same company as Vlad the sociopath (good news for Ukraine at last with the onion muncher's master no longer able to block), the Taliban and fundamentalist US evangelicals, and so all the pond can do is point to the jihad in the intermittent archive.

Ditto the pond has neither the time nor the space for women writing about men in heartfelt tones ...

Carving out space for men and boys beyond the shed
There’s been an erosion of the spaces where men gather. Traditional sites of male sociability are in long-term decline.
By Suzana Hardy

So few had cared that the pond had to personally supervise the piece's appearance in the intermittent archive.

Speaking of tradition, whatever happened to traditional spellings of Shoshan or Shoshannah, or if you will Susan, Susanna, or Susannah? The pond has been unnerved ever since Sussssan lost out in her battle with the lettuce.

The pond will also merely note the Thursday presence of Jack the Insider ...

Starmer flailing in a mire of his own making
Rather than seizing the opportunities, the British PM has spent his time stumbling around in a room full of upturned rakes.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Again the pond had to do the hard intermittent archive yards, and the pond does appreciate Jack's ongoing attempts to present as one of the more sensible reptiles, interested in life outside the hive mind, but why on earth would the pond want to waste time with him when the pond could revert to Marina delivering a jolly good Hydeing a few days ago in It’s a nightmare on Downing Street: Starmer has no one left to blame for this Mandelson horror show?

Phew, even doing a reptile survey is thirsty work, and the pond is in need of a break.

Actually that Luckovich is in the spirit of the proceedings, because as a final offering, the pond should note that the season is now in full swing, with the latest dire attempt to invoke the spirit of Gallipoli coming in this form ...

The pond settled for a couple of screen caps because it's such a pitiful and wretched searching for relevance, an attempt to use current events to fit into the spirit of the Dardanelles season that's so naked that it has no shame.

If wanting to talk of US military fiascos, any number of more recent examples spring to mind ... from 'Nam through the Iraq folly to the Afghanistan debacle, with that resulting in a never ending horror for the women of Afghanistan, while the latest reward for those Afghanis who supported and helped US troops is to be deported to the Congo. (Oh the mad King and his minions are so cruel in so many appalling ways).

Forget all that - somehow it's the spirit of the season to drag the Dardanelles back into the picture ...

Really? The spirit of a Dardanelles inquiry might assist the United States in sorting out its seemingly endless appetite for military excursions and adventures, even as the mad King campaigned for his re-election on the basis of no more wars and no more adventures and an isolationist America first?

Sigh, best whip up a batch of original Tamworth recipe Anzac biscuits in the spirit of the season.

Oh wait, the pond still has a spare pack of Aldi Pfeffernüsse cookies left over from the Xmas season! 

Is that in the spirit of the current season, or like peppermints, will it give a dire hint of an appetite for Blut und Boden?

Best turn to the immortal Rowe to close with a reminder of Geoff chambering that round ...

And here's an echo of the bromancer ... because while Sir Keir might just be skidmarks on the tar after the next round of UK local council elections, the hapless Poms still have the pleasure of noting the real multiple car freeway pile up ...