In which Our Henry is legendary, and more than makes up for disappointing outings by Killer and the craven Craven ...

 

Amazing scenes ...

The pond didn't expect to wake up to the lizard Oz breaking the news that the Emperor Penguin and the Antarctic fur seal were in a spot of bother.

Sssh, never disturb the reptiles when they're in their climate denialist slumber.

The reptiles love themselves extinction events and do everything to make them possible. It requires quiet, diligent unostentatious work, and the rewards are in the deeds themselves ...

Nor did the pond expect the reptiles to care about Melania trying to deny any connection to Epstein. (Oh dear, the tabloid Beast video take is here, and it seems the denials are accompanied by the worst poll figures ever). 

The reptiles long ago forgot about those files, so who cares if Melania blowing all that smoke hinted at a some hidden fire.

Instead, what with the lizard Oz being the Australian Daily Zionist News, the pond had expected a celebration of the sociopathic current government of Israel, and its current mission to arrive at a greater Israel ...

But when the pond turned eagerly to read Our Henry on a Friday to cop its daily dose of Zionism, the dear lad, the pompous pedant, went one better ...

The header: Why Donald Trump is the bastard son of the Enlightenment; It is an illusion to think that fundamentalists are driven by a rational assessment of interests rather than by their fanaticism.

The caption for the snap of the mad King showing off his tiny hands: President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office. Picture: Alex Brandon / AP Photo

Our Henry this day returned to top form, ably assisted by the lizard Oz graphics department, burrowing through ancient archives to find royalty-free images.

The old humbug modestly admitted to eccentricity and perhaps a touch of blasphemy as he blamed King Donald on ancient nobs.

Yes, King Donald is all the fault of the Enlightenment ...

It may seem eccentric – if not positively blasphemous – to suggest that Donald Trump is a child of the Enlightenment. Voltaire, Hume and Kant would scarcely have recognised him as their progeny; they might have winced, incredulous at history’s cruel irony.
Yet the family resemblance is real. For it was the long 18th century’s great philosophers who advanced one of modernity’s most consequential wagers: that interests would subdue passions. If human beings could be induced to pursue their interests rather than defend dogmas and chase glory, conflict itself might be domesticated – shifted from the battlefield to the bargaining table.
This was, in other words, the intellectual origin of “the art of the deal”: the belief that, in the end, every actor has a price, and that rational self-interest will draw antagonists toward compromise. Strangely, the 19th and 20th centuries – whose wars grew ever more destructive – did not abandon that conviction but entrenched it, even as the evidence mounted that it obscured more than it revealed.
The intellectual genealogy, too complex to detail here, runs from the early modern rehabilitation of self-interest to “Mar-a-Lago on the Gaza shore” – but the crucial moment lies in Duc Henri de Rohan’s 1638 distinction between passion, grounded in impulse, and interest, grounded in calculation. His maxim, rendered in English as “interest will not lie”, eventually became, in JA Gunn’s phrase, “the most fashionable political concept in the 17th century”.
Interests, Rohan maintained, were stable, reasonable and predictable. Passions, by contrast, connoted volatility, irrationality and barbarism. The genius of the moderns was to transform conflicts over values into conflicts over interests – interests that could be divided, negotiated and settled.
What gave this idea its force was the rise of commerce, the domain of calculation par excellence. A powerful chain of reasoning followed: a commercial society would cultivate habits of calculative rationality; those habits would permeate social norms and expectations, and; over time, coolly defined interests would supplant tempestuous passions. The result would not be the disappearance of conflict, but its intelligent management: regularised, negotiated and, above all, contained.

Here's where the reptile graphics department helped out, what with their incessant thirst for free images pillaged from the full to overflowing intertubes ... Immanuel Kant. David Hume.

Inspired, the hole in bucket man plunged on with his thesis, which was a nifty way of distracting from the sociopathic ways of Benji and his minions ...

Montesquieu coined that proposition’s most celebrated formulation in 1748. “The natural effect of commerce,” he wrote in The Spirit of the Laws, “is to bring about peace. Two nations which trade together render themselves reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling.” In this way, “the spirit of commerce unites nations”.
More ambitiously still, commerce offers a “cure for the most destructive prejudices”; for, “wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners” – the “mild” (doux) habits that sustain contracts between traders and agreements between states.
In Montesquieu’s thought, this tendency had a providential cast. The 19th and 20th centuries translated it into a secular idiom. It was no longer commerce alone that would inculcate rationality, but the expanding authority of science and, even more, of complex technology – domains whose effective operation seemed to require disciplined, instrumentally rational thought. Although rarely stated so baldly, much of the “modernisation” literature of the 1950s and 1960s implied a simple syllogism: anyone capable of building missiles must reason as the boffins in Langley do – and, sooner or later, will act with similar calculative restraint in both conflict and co-operation.
The consequence was that fanaticism – what David Hume called “enthusiasm” – would gradually recede. Hume argued that disputes “from interest are the most reasonable and the most excusable”, precisely because they admit of bargained resolution; those of religion, by contrast, are “more furious and enraged than the most cruel factions that ever arose from interest”.
But the extinction of “enthusiasm” did not require religion’s disappearance. It was, said Alexis de Tocqueville, enough that religion evolve toward forms that reinforced the mundane virtues of co-operation, moderation, tolerance and self-mastery. And that, the modernisation theorists believed, was precisely the direction the major faiths would take in technologically savvy societies.

Now the pond will concede that Our Henry showed off his Zionist Islamophobia ... never let it be said that his enthusiasm slacks off or recedes ...

Clifford Geertz cast doubt on that optimism. In Islam Observed (1968), synthesising years of fieldwork in Morocco and Indonesia, he argued that modernisation – and the spread of education – could inflame rather than tame religious extremism.
Minds trained to prize analytical coherence had, in his experience, recoiled from the tolerant syncretism of Moroccan Sufism and from Indonesia’s gentle blend of Islam, Hinduism and animism, turning instead toward more rigorous, purified and uncompromising forms of faith.
It was therefore no accident that, as Albert Hourani observed in Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1983), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani anticipated later currents of Islamic fundamentalism, despite being one of the 19th century’s most influential Muslim advocates of science and technology. “If someone asks: why are Muslims in retreat?”, wrote al-Afghani, “I will answer: when they were truly Muslims, the world bore witness to their excellence.” Nor was it accidental that several of the September 11 terrorists were highly trained engineers.

The pond acknowledges that Our Henry seems incapable of contemplating the worst excesses of rabid Xian fundamentalists and evangelical bigots, or for that matter, the outer reaches of weird fundamentalist Judaism.

But feel the width of all the guilty parties ... Francois Voltaire. John Stuart Mill.

Sock it to 'em ...

Technical mastery did not inevitably advance the spirit of bargaining and moderation. On the contrary, the ability to build missiles could give zealots the means to hasten the apocalypse, dismember the infidels, and honour a compact not with other men but with God – a compact that admits neither compromise nor restraint. Utterly irrational ends could be pursued by eminently rational means.
That conjunction – technical sophistication in the service of fanaticism – is the Iranian regime in miniature. That does not mean the regime will never enter into agreements. But, following the precedent set by the Prophet Muhammad at the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, any such agreement is a “hudna” or temporary armistice at best, a fleeting ceasefire at worst, to be systematically violated whenever possible, and openly repudiated as soon as practicable.
Far from vindicating the Enlightenment’s hopes, those agreements show how readily fanatics can advance their cause by exploiting the West’s illusions, knowing that it lacks the stomach for a prolonged fight. And to make things worse, the agreements’ record is a miserably poor one. As John Stuart Mill – whom no one could plausibly accuse of warmongering – warned, the lesson of the centuries is that “barbarians cannot be depended on for observing any rules,” nor to “reciprocate concessions”.
Time and again, the tiny seed the Due de Rohan planted has therefore borne bitter fruit, as striking deals with fanatics becomes, all too often, an excuse for compromises that turn out to be capitulations.
Yet the “art of the deal”, and the confidence that every conflict is merely a high-stakes version of a real estate negotiation, has a magnetic hold on the Western mind – and on few minds is its grip firmer than on that of America’s 47th president. That his negotiators with Iran have been commercial deal-makers, not hardened experts in handling rogue regimes, should therefore come as no surprise.
Yes, as they look down from on high, Voltaire, Hume and Kant may shake their heads in disbelief. But this much is undeniable: Donald J. Trump is the Enlightenment’s bastard son.

Splendid stuff. That's the way to wrap your bigotry, in a word salad of pretentious bile ...

And so to Killer, and after the hole in bucket man's splendid effort, the pond must confess to being disappointed...

The header: Why more pollies in federal parliament just makes sense; There’s been no significant increase in federal parliamentarians since 1984, despite a near doubling of the population.

The caption for a snap of a den of iniquity: Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond will always pay attention to Killer, but the heady days of Covid, masks, vaccines and such like are long gone, and this was contrarianism pushed to a stupefying level of dullness ...

When the Institute of Public Affairs and the left-wing Australia Institute agree on a policy, it’s likely a meritorious one that deserves consideration.
It’s a reminder of how broken our political system has become when a proposal to increase the number of members of federal parliament was killed off by the Prime Minister late last month after the Coalition dared the government to publicly support it.
Sensible people in the Labor and Liberal parties have supported an increase, as the number of voters per federal seat – almost 121,000 – has become absurdly large, making a mockery of the idea that MPs share a deep connection with constituents. There’s been no significant increase in federal parliamentarians since 1984, despite a near doubling of the population.
Then Liberal MP James Stevens in 2024 asked the Parliamentary Budget Office to cost an increase of 24 new MPs and 16 senators. Labor minister Don Farrell has been promoting a similar change too.
Representation isn’t the only argument in favour of change. Committees with odd numbers of members are logically able to produce clear majorities, yet our half-Senate elections make only six Senate spots available in every state (and four for the territories).
Whatever the trials and tribulations of individual parties, those of the right and left in Australia enjoy the support of about half the electorate, which tends to produce impotent 3-3 voting blocs. Half-Senate elections of seven or nine senators per state would make the upper house more likely to produce ideological majorities – and more quickly.
Significantly more members and senators would help transform the parliament from a costly rubber stamp for the government into what it was meant to be: a check on power and a forum for a genuine exchange of ideas.

The pond supposes it should quibble. 

Why is the Australian Institute dubbed "lefty", while Killer avoids describing the Institute of Public Affairs as an extreme far right organisation in the grip of big tobacco, big mining, and anything else big enough to keep paying their wages?

Is there anything worse than Killer trying to sound normal, mounting staid, tedious arguments for more pollies? 

Even the distracting snaps are incredibly dull: Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaking during the weekly session of Prime Minister's Questions. Picture: House of Commons / AFP.

Perhaps Killer means well, but the pond would much rather be off with Melania ...

Section 65 of the Constitution mandates that the number of ministers “should not exceed seven in number … until the parliament otherwise provides”.
It’s a great shame that second part was included, because the number of ministers and hangers-on dependent on government largesse has exploded, ensuring no backbencher dares criticise the government for fear of ruling out a potentially lucrative promotion.
While our question time has become a stage-managed joke, in the UK’s 650-member House of Commons MPs in the cheap seats routinely rise to slam senior members of their own party – the ratio of ministers to backbench MPs is tiny.
Meanwhile, in Canberra, the ratio is ludicrously large. In 2019, for instance, I wrote a column that pointed out how 96 of the 104 Coalition members of the federal parliament were ministers, former ministers, committee chairs or deputy chairs, or holders of some other parliamentary ­office that bumped up their salary.
Comically, more than 40 per cent of Coalition MPs were ministers given the Morrison government’s previous slim election victory.
Angus Taylor warned that expanding the parliament would cost $620m including all associated staff and travel costs. But that was over eight years, and amounts to a farcically small share of the $786bn the federal government plans to spend this financial year alone.
The National and Liberal parties apparently didn’t think to make their support for any increase strictly conditional on permanent budget savings, a move that doesn’t inspire confidence in their ability to slash the budget by far more than a relatively paltry $78m a year.
Educated proponents of the prevailing number of seats might well quote the great conservative writer Edmund Burke, who famously told voters in the late 18th century in Bristol that their representative in London “owed you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion”.
Naturally, members of parliament should think for themselves and be prepared to persuade their constituents of what he or she believes to be right. But surely Burke assumed MPs would at least know what their constituents’ views were to begin with.

How dull could the distractions get? Why, it's ancient history time ... Canada’s former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Picture: Chris Wattie / Reuters

The pond gets it.

It's incredibly bold and brave for Killer to push back against the likes of the beefy boofhead, or to mock the liar from the shire, but this faux attempt at peace-making is tedious as all get out ...

Rapid population growth in the cities relative to the regions has created numerous vast federal seats larger than most European nations, making it practically impossible, and even dangerous, for MPs to attempt to meet voters. Durack in Western Australia is larger than France and Spain combined.
Moreover, as urban seats become larger and larger, they necessarily become more similar to each other, neutering the whole point of a Westminster system that is meant to give different regions and suburbs a unique voice.
The modest increase currently on the table would still leave the federal parliament critically smaller than its peers. Canada’s federal lower house includes 341 members, for instance, while New Zealand’s has around 30,000 voters per member.
Perhaps fearful of the direct financial impact of One Nation’s rise, the two major parties recently got together to legislate a massive increase in their claim on the public purse. Soon the per vote taxpayer-funded subsidy of political parties will jump from around $3.50 to $5, the biggest increase ever.
The IPA and the Australia Institute probably would not agree on that outrageous gouge. If only the two parties had chosen instead to conspire on something that would both benefit them as well as the voting public.
Alas, for now that seems too much to ask.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Quick, back to scribbling about masks, vaccines, and the ways to score a FIFA peace prize...

As for the rest, the reptiles over on the extreme far right were focussed on that upcoming trial.

The meretricious Merritt was busy with his usual serve of FUD.

Why Ben Roberts-Smith may be denied a fair trial
This country needs to come to terms with the fact that there is a real risk that Ben Roberts-Smith will not be given a fair trial.
By Chris Merritt
Legal Affairs Contributor

The pond was forced to send this to the intermittent archive, always a dodgy thing to do.

It was barely working this morning, but at least a teaser trailer would show the cut of his jib and give correspondents the chance to think about whether they really needed to read the rest of the FUD ...

Yeah, yeah, FUD ...

The pond had to toss the rest ofthe meretricious Merritt FUD into the void to make room for the craven Craven.

Not that there's anything interesting to read in the outing, save that it's a chance to see the craven Craven sailing against the meretricious tide ... and just like Killer, the craven Craven will always find a home in the pond, no matter how tedious or righteous he manages to sound ...

Say what? Jail the meretricious Merritt for contempt of court?

Well if being a baying commentator is the crime, then he's guilty as hell.

After those opening flourishes - surely the reference to Charles I keeps the spirit of Our Henry alive? - the craven Craven began to sound righteous in a most un-reptile way ...

....Fundamentally, he cannot be found guilty unless a rigorously selected jury finds him so beyond reasonable doubt. This is the appropriately high bar for the punishment of any Australian citizen, particularly on charges as dreadful as these.
So the rule of law both holds Roberts-Smith to account – and protects him. He is bound by the law, but cannot be convicted without due process against a prodigious standard of proof, before a rigorously selected jury.
This is what his extra-legal supporters have to understand. You cannot have one without the other. If you ditch the law of criminal responsibility, you necessarily ditch the corresponding principle of the presumption of innocence. Of course, rule of law is pretty easy when you are dealing with common burglary or embezzlement. But put it in the context of a national hero fighting a dirty war against treacherous opponents and fault lines emerge.
Add to this a large evidential cast of fellow soldiers, friends, detractors and even potentially actual Afghan enemies and you have a legal witch’s brew.
Then stir in the evidence and outcomes of Roberts-Smith’s utterly ill-advised defamation action to produce a quagmire of confusion. In principle, these civil outcomes should not affect the criminal trial, but they will identify plenty of bushes for the prosecution to look under. Certainly, they will influence public opinion.
There is a natural temptation – even a commonsense intuition – to assess the alleged actions of Roberts-Smith exclusively in the context of the Afghan War. What are you meant to do when everyone is a potential armed enemy?
There also is the siren’s song of rampant pragmatism. How can we expect Australians to enlist as soldiers for horrific wars if they know they’ll be legally abandoned at the first sustained legal volley?
These arguments have been put forward by my friend, Tony Abbott, and my very much non-friend, Pauline Hanson. But they are wrong, both in terms of the legal process and legal principle.

What was in the water this day? Killer calling for more pollies, the craven Craven renouncing the onion muncher?

Luckily the reptiles blurred this snap so the pond didn't have the foggiest idea who it was ... Ben Roberts-Smith arrested at Sydney Airport over alleged war crimes. Picture: Australian Federal Police

Perhaps a snap featuring tatts would have helped ...

Extraordinary hidden meaning of Ben Roberts-Smith's 'Crusader' tattoos - as he removes one forever

The pond took the chance to provide a little balance to Our Henry's wise words ...

On his right side, there is a Spartan helmet emblazoned across his ribcage, in a nod to the fearsome warriors of Ancient Greece...
...The father of twin girls also has a Jerusalem Cross across the right side of his chest, with what appears to be a knight on a horse inset into the centre of the motif.
The Jerusalem Cross is also known as the Crusader's Cross.
The cross is rooted in the Crusades of 1095-1291, when European Christians fought Muslims for control of Jerusalem, which Muslims ultimately won.
Donald Trump's US Secretary of War and ex-Fox News host Pete Hegseth also sports a Crusader's Cross tattoo over his heart.
The former National Guard member claims he was pulled from duty on the day of Joe Biden's 2021 presidential inauguration because his cross tattoo 'unfairly' identified him as an extremist.
The Crusader's Cross can also be seen on the national flag of Georgia.
Above Roberts-Smith's cross are the words 'I shall never fail my brothers', written in cursive script...
...On left side of the soldiers's body, there is a small cross with a loop at the top, visible underneath the start of his intricate dragon sleeve.
The crucifix-like image is an Ankh, or the ancient Egyptian 'key of life' symbol.
Inside Roberts-Smith's left-arm sleeve, along his inner forearm, are the Latin words Decus Prosapia Tellus, roughly translated as 'Glory/honour of the family's land'.

And so on, and now back to the craven Craven ...

On process, now is not the time to be ventilating material that either hurts or harms Roberts-Smith. It is indispensable to a fair trial that no jury be potentially contaminated by speculation or contumely. Anybody who tries it will be guilty of contempt.
This applies particularly to investigative journalists inclined to bask publicly in their triumph. A prison cell is a cold place to receive a Walkley. As a matter of principle, the presumption of innocence requires trial by law, not media. Evidence is to be formally sifted and tested, not advanced by irrefutable innuendo.
But these cannot be used as arguments that Roberts-Smith should be “let off” because he is a war hero, was in a rotten war, faced a corrupt and deceptive foe or simply had no choice in the matter.
We should remember that the situation alleged did not actually amount to an impossible choice, as sometimes happens in war. Roberts-Smith and his men did not face certain death – or even capture – without a field execution. The survival of a plausible enemy in their vicinity certainly elevated risk in an already dire situation of a small group of men stuck in hostile territory against a background of almost unimaginable stress.
But the fundamental question is stark. Are we really Nazis or Stalinist commissars who see death as a transactional calculation? Do we believe the killing of ostensibly unarmed prisoners is merely a question of circumstance, to be argued away by what our legal system traditionally has referred to as “necessity, the devil’s plea”.
There are philosophers who have argued the point. But no philosophical formula can ever argue away the proposition of common human decency that even a besieged soldier cannot kill outside actual, deadly combat.

In a rotten war?

Dear sweet long absent lord, the pond's world is falling apart, what a relief that the reptiles offered a couple of snaps of genuine heroes ... Senator Pauline Hanson. Senator Pauline Hanson. Former prime minister Tony Abbott.

And so the final gobbet ...

Ironically, this is a pungent expression of the same basic value that must protect Roberts-Smith. Just as an enemy operative cannot be slaughtered as a matter of calculated tactical advantage, neither can an accused Australian soldier be locked up for the edification of hostile journalists or army-hating progressives.
In these sorts of awful matters, there is indeed a point at which the pressures of surrounding horror, uncertainty and homicidal hostility become relevant. But hard as it is to say, that is at the point of sentencing and punishment, not trial.
If we accept that Australian soldiers can execute as well as kill, we can have no argument against our enemies doing the same to us. Moral equivalence cuts both ways.
I have no idea what I would do if I were trapped in a hostile country with every stone, tree and person an enemy. Probably, I would hide under a rock or run screaming away, coward that I am.
But admiration for the brave can never excuse atrocity. Otherwise, the difference between us and the war criminals of WWII is merely one of great degree, not difference.
Greg Craven is a former vice- chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.

He even invoked the Nuremberg clause?!

Is it time for the ICC to make a move, because clearly senility, dementia, sundowning or infancy is no defence ...

And so to a brief mention of some thoughts that could be found in Anne Applebaum's latest open letter...

As the onion muncher has been mentioned, it's worth remembering that he has been a lickspittle fellow traveller,  a worshipper at the feet of Orbán ...

...The re-election of Orbán would be bad for Hungarians and bad for Europe. Inside the EU, Orbán functions as a Russian puppet, blocking European aid to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia. In telephone conversations with the Russian president, leaked to Bloomberg, the Hungarian prime minister can be heard telling the Russian president that he is a “mouse” to Putin’s “lion.” The Hungarian foreign minister also makes regular calls to his Russian counterpart after EU meetings. Given that Russian missiles are still killing Ukrainians every day, that Russian cyberattacks and sabotage continue to destablize Europe and that Russian propaganda still seeks to undermine European democracies, Vance’s mere presence in Budapest was deeply offensive to millions of Europeans.
It was also very strange. Vance, while interfering in Hungary’s election, baselessly condemned the EU for allegedly interfering in Hungary’s election. He talked about “faceless bureaucrats” from Brussels, a phrase borrowed from British politics that illustrates real ignorance. Important decisions in Brussels are taken by the political leaders of the 27 member states. During his speech, which you can watch here, Vance also peddled a myth that Hungary is under threat from “a small band of radicals” who hate Western civilization. But Peter Magyar, leader of Tisza, the large Hungarian opposition party, waves Hungarian flags and used to be a member of Orbán’s own party. Tisza is not some kind of revolutionary Marxist cell.
In truth, Vance knows little or nothing about the country he is visiting, and in this sense he resembles Trump. Like Trump, Vance is using American foreign policy for personal self-promotion. He knows that Orbán has symbolic importance to the autocratic far-right, especially in the US. Project 2025 was heavily influenced by the Hungarian example, as was the Trump administration’s assault on American universities. By paying homage to Europe’s leading autocratic populist, Vance is symbolically supporting those American projects. He has no more interest in the people of Hungary, their prosperity and well-being, than Trump has in the people of Iran. If he did, he would not be there at all.

Well yes, and now this is just to troll Our Henry ...