In which the pond goes Latin mass before turning to Lord Downer, the onion muncher and Major Mitchell ..

 

The pond isn't going to go into the funeral it attended, which was a private affair in the form of a Catholic communion mass, but did want to note one aspect of the service.

But first an anecdote. A long, long time ago, in a Tamworth far away, wreathed in the mists of time, the pond attended St Dominic's Catholic school, run by Dominican nuns in what was then obligatory full penguin gear. (Later the site was sold, the building demolished and the space turned into a car park).

After lying about sins in confession to get a quick 'all clear' from a mysterious priest tucked away behind a screen ("disobedience" was always handy, as was in later times "impure thoughts") and saying the odd cleansing Hail Mary, students were obliged to attend mass at the next door St Nick's.

One time after the priest had stuck a wafer on the pond's tongue (a feat involving some dexterity) a wafer fragment got stuck in the pond's teeth. 

Wandering back to the pew, the pond began to poke at this disagreeable bit of wafer with a finger in an attempt to dislodge it... when whack, a nun's hand delivered a sharp blow to the pond's cheek, the sound reverberating through the church.

Then she she leaned in, face contorted in anger, hissing words to the effect: "Don't you ever dare touch the body of Christ".

At that cheek-reddening, flesh-bruising moment, the pond was enlightened. 

This wafer was no symbolic token gesture, this wafer was the actual body of Christ. 

The pond was committing an act of flesh-eating cannibalism, of the same genus as all those cannibal stories that littered children's adventure fiction. 

It was ... transubstantiation. (The official word for the concept came later to the pond. If you've never been there, you'll probably never get it.)

Let no filthy, grubby paw, or digit, get in the way of the magical moment when a priest put Christ's flesh on tongue, and the recipient gobbles down actual human flesh with pious relish.

Fast forward, and in the funeral service the pond was aghast, shocked and disturbed to see the priest passing out wafers to the grubby, grasping paws of the congregation. Then they could stuff the wafers in their mouths by themselves. 

It was still flesh eating, but it was somehow prosaic and sordid, entirely without magic.

The last funeral communion mass the pond attended had been in pre-Covid days, and apparently this variation was introduced as a way to help deal with Covid.

The pond urgently wanted the opinion of Robert Kennedy on this, but he was too busy attending to a raccoon penis. Still the pond wondered whether mixing a little Ivermectin into the holy water might not have been a better solution, thereby allowing the priest to still deliver magical wafer direct to tongue. 

The pond thought of that Dominican nun, now probably long dead, and wondered how she might have coped with this new age of heresy.

Eventually a sullen pond began to mutter the responses under breath in best Mel Gibson style - "Et cum spiritu tuo", "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccáta mundi, miserére nobis", and so on, proving that years of indoctrination can survive a long time, and that while you can take an ex-Catholic out of the church, you can't take the church out of the ex-Catholic. (You are with Mel, JD, in a love of the Latin mass, aren't you?)

And speaking of heretics, it's time for reptiles filling the hive mind of the lizard Oz with odious, grubby thoughts...

Today it's all about the war and mad King Donald and the bumbling incompetence of him and his minions, and naturally the reptiles were out and about looking for excuses and people to blame.

Lord Downer led the way ...

The header: Progressive left backs our enemies, kills our economy; The policies of the left are driven by its ideology. They’re driven by the vibe.

The caption for an image designed to terrify the hive mind: Iranian women part in a rally to pay tribute to women killed during the Middle East war, in Tehran. Picture: AFP

Progressives kill the economy? Be fair, no progressive could manage the amount of damage inflicted on the world economy by mad King Donald and his minions, by way of tariff wars and meaningless wars of choice.

But Lord Downer is never inclined to be fair, he's more inclined to be relentlessly stupid ...

If ever you wanted evidence that the progressive left has taken over most of the key institutions of the Western world in recent years, have a look at how the West has reacted to the Iran war. First, much of the progressive left in the liberal democratic world clearly hopes that a brutal autocracy such as Iran’s wins the war against America and Israel.
The progressive left hates Donald Trump more than it loathes the Iranian theocracy. The left doesn’t care that Iran, especially through its proxies, has been at war with Israel since 1979. When the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps massacred 40,000 people at the end of last year and early this year, the progressive left didn’t care, just as it doesn’t care about the estimated 150,000 people who have been killed in the Sudan civil war and the 12 million displaced. It doesn’t care about rockets being fired on behalf of Iran into Israel daily. All it cares about is the horror of Israel defending itself. As is said of the ABC’s international reporting, “no Jews, no news”.
Secondly, the Iran war has demonstrated how utterly self-defeating Western energy policies – driven by the intense advocacy of the progressive left – have been over the past two decades.
Nowhere has this fecklessness been truer than in our own country. Instead of urging the Iranians to agree to American demands to end arming and directing proxies in the Middle East, desist from developing ballistic missiles and other weapons to threaten their neighbours, and to abandon their nuclear program, what does the Australian government do? It urges de-escalation. That’s it. Not consistent condemnation of Iran, but implicit neutrality. We all know why. It’s about domestic politics.

And what would crusader Lord Downer have us do? Hie off to the strait to join the crusade in all its folly? Quick, another snap designed to terrify the hive mind into fear and submission ... Supporters of the Iran-backed Houthi movement brandish their weapons as they rally in solidarity with Iran and Lebanon in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on April 17. Picture: AFP

Terrifying, but warrior Lord Downer is made of stern stuff, and didn't wilt ...

President Trump isn’t popular, so the war is not popular. What is more, there are all those left-wing voters in parts of Sydney and Melbourne who hope Iran will be able to see off the Americans and the Israelis. So the Prime Minister and his ministers are very careful not to be too supportive of our ally, who is the guarantor of the security of the Western world and way of life.
The Iran war has also laid bare the absurdity of the energy policies Australia has been pursuing for the past 20 years. Despite the tens of billions of dollars poured into renewables, still 92 per cent of Australia’s energy consumption comes from fossil fuels. But the progressive left – in particular, the Labor Party and the Greens – has spent two decades railing against fossil fuel exploitation in Australia. It has given an impression that Australia is enjoying an energy transition of great rapidity, and this is going to generate cheaper energy. We will also reduce global temperatures.

Ah, the old fossil fuel routine, but the pond has done enough celebrating of the joys of EVs. 

Quick, instead produce another image designed to terrify the hive mind ... Iranian women brandish their rifles as they take part in a rally to pay tribute to women killed during the Middle East war. Picture: AFP

It would take more than a few women to deter His Lordship, but what with the war being a bit of a mess, he soon had to veer off into all sorts of thickets and weeds ...

Anybody with a practical bent of mind will be interested in the results. Not only have we contributed precisely nothing to abating global temperature but, alarmingly, the level of productivity in the Australian energy sector has declined by about 30 per cent over the past 20 years. That means we require substantially more capital investment for the same level of output. No wonder Australia’s electricity prices have increased by about 60 per cent in that period.
Well, as soon as the Strait of Hormuz was closed, reality struck home. We’re still hugely dependent on fossil fuels, and the energy transition has made energy more expensive, and we have had literally no impact whatsoever on the climate over the past 20 years.
Not surprisingly, corporates have been reluctant to invest in searching for and developing oilfields in and off Australia, as well as being restricted in their capacity to drill for gas.
What is extraordinary is that our governments, dominated by the progressive left, have discouraged the development of known exploitable onshore and offshore oilfields.
Let’s take two examples. Recently, the Queensland government announced it would give approval for the development of the Taroom Trough oil and gas field. This is the first development of an oilfield in Australia in 50 years. Yet for years the progressive left has wanted to leave it untouched. Secondly, and more dramatically, Santos has discovered a vast oil and gas field known as Dorado off the coast of Western Australia. Santos estimates this contains about 150 million barrels of oil, so it’s a sizeable deposit. It’s roughly the equivalent of Australia’s current total annual production of oil. If the Dorado deposit were exploited, it would give Australia significantly greater self-sufficiency in oil.
So why hasn’t Santos gone ahead and invested in the exploitation of Dorado?
The answer is illustrative of everything that’s wrong with the progressive left approach to energy policies. Santos have just weathered years of litigation to get the Barossa gas field off the coast of the Northern Territory up and running. It has been bogged down in litigation, driven by the Environmental Defenders Office, which gets $2m a year in funding from the federal Labor government.
Ultimately, Santos held off these challenges, but at substantial cost to the company. More than that, this litigation damaged Australia’s reputation as a country to invest in.
At the same time as discovering the Dorado oilfield, Santos also discovered an oil deposit in Alaska. The company decided it was far less risky and therefore far more profitable for its shareholders to proceed with the Alaska project.
There you have it. As a result of the policies of the progressive left, we failed to develop millions of barrels of oil offshore in Australia, oil, which would have given us genuine energy security.
So for the past four years, we’ve had a federal government opposed to fossil fuels, and suddenly it’s crying crocodile tears about a shortage of oil supplies because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Prime Minister is burning up fossil fuels flying to Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia, begging them not to withdraw their supply of fossil fuels to Australia.
By the way, it’s not as if they would. The trips are just a political stunt.
That’s the progressive left for you. Policies are driven by its ideology. They’re driven by the vibe, not Australia’s tradition of practical policymaking.

Driven by the vibe? This hapless old antique is as ancient as The Castle, but without the first clue as to how to do comedy ...

The pond's mission this day is simply to line up a few reptiles for the pleasure of correspondents.

Sadly the pond couldn't spot the Caterist early in the morning and so had to settle for the onion muncher, a truly wretched and depressing thought ...

The header: PM’s begging tour exposes fuel security ignorance; As prime minister, I reluctantly accepted the official advice that efficient global markets meant that maintaining 90 days’ supply of liquid fuels onshore was no longer necessary. But now it’s critical.

The caption: Brunei's Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah (left), Crown Prince Al-Muhtadee Billah (centre) and Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese walk after their official luncheon at Istana Nurul Iman in Bandar Seri Begawan on April 15. Picture: AFP

The pond hopes such onion muncher appearances aren't going to become a regular feature of the lizard Oz.

With his time as lickspittle sycophantic stooge in service to Viktor Mihály Orbán now over, the suck might now think he's out of a job, and in his narcissist way, turn to the lizard Oz to maintain his feeble attempt at relevance ...

Is he going to keep turning up in the lizard Oz to rabbit on in ways that will please other authoritarians? Is that the sort of punishment the reptiles are lining up for the hive mind? 

The on-again, off-again reopening of the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t mean that Australia can take fuel security for granted. This is actually our second wake-up call about over-reliance on global supply chains and we can’t afford to go back to sleep once more, as we did after the first.
As prime minister, I reluctantly accepted the official advice that efficient global markets meant that maintaining 90 days’ supply of liquid fuels onshore was no longer necessary. The global scramble for masks, surgical gowns and vaccines during the pandemic made it obvious that, in an emergency, it would be every country for itself.
In its wake, the Morrison government asked the Productivity Commission to consider our supply chain vulnerability but – remarkably – its report hardly mentioned fuel security, even though no country on Earth is as dependent on fuel imports.
The Prime Minister’s begging tour around Asia, shows just how exposed we are to any disruption in global fuel supply. The month’s supply of petrol, diesel, avgas and jet fuel that we supposedly had at the start of the Iran war included only about three weeks’ worth that was actually onshore. The rest was cargoes at sea that, in extremis, could be sunk, or possibly diverted to other destinations in the event of a major threat to shipping.

Of course the joke is ...

Never gets old that one, but of course the narcissist is more interested in posing as relevant by having a snap of himself, preening into the void ... Tony Abbott. Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

Why is the lizard Oz filled to the brim with deadbeat ancient politicians who proved completely useless when in power?

Who knows, it's just a matter of getting through it ...

Iran’s denial of freedom of navigation through the Strait did not interfere with the actual delivery of refined products to Australia so much as the delivery of crude oil to the Asian refineries we buy from. Even so, the pump price of diesel in Australia almost doubled, about 10 per cent of our servos ran out of some or all stock due to panic buying, airlines started to cancel flights, and ports, mines and farms suddenly had to reconsider their operations.
While the Albanese government gave assurances that supplies were guaranteed until May, there could be no assurances beyond that because friendly countries (such as Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia) could not be sure of their own stock, and unfriendly ones (such as China) had already suspended deliveries.
The Prime Minister’s “fuel diplomacy coup” in securing two extra deliveries, each of 100 million litres, sounded impressive but actually constituted less than two days’ total Australian consumption. What’s more, it bordered on deranged for the government to insist that further electrification was the long-term solution to the fuel crisis, even while the PM was pleading for extra petrol and diesel.
Here’s the key point: a conflict in East Asia – such as Beijing attempting to coerce Taiwan – would not just close down deliveries of crude oil; it would close down the deliveries of refined products too.

Naturally there's a snap of the deviant to blame - not mad King Donald, but another miscreant, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

And then it's on to the usual blather about oils and whatever you do don't mention renewables or alternative sources of energy, because this is a bear with little by way of brains, having always been a few knights short of a BBQ ...

There would be no question of being able to trade security of gas supplies from Australia for security of fuel supplies from Southeast Asia because the moment hostilities in East Asia were imminent, the shipping lanes carrying 50 per cent of the world’s trade would shut down.
It would take months for protected convoys to be arranged, even if the tankers and container ships could be procured to sail in them; and that’s assuming Australia and its allies had the requisite naval strength.
It’s worth noting that the US did not even try to counter the closure of the Strait of Hormuz either by landing troops at key choke points or by escorting ships through. It was the US’s counter-blockade of Iran’s ports, doing to Iran what it was doing to others’ shipping, that might have created a breakthrough.
Countries such as Britain and France, that might once have considered forcing the Strait, were adamant they could only secure the passage of shipping once hostilities had ceased. In other words, the task of protecting shipping seems to have become much harder in the era of smart mines and drone swarms. Which makes it more important than ever not to be dependent on just-in-time deliveries for the essentials of daily life.
It’s crystal clear what Australia now needs to do to avoid massive domestic upheaval when the next supply crisis comes, as it almost inevitably will.
First, we need to build the 90 days of fuel reserves onshore that the International Energy Agency mandates. Much of this could be done by assisting large fuel users to expand their private storages.
Second, we need to resume exploration, extraction and refining of crude oil here. The development of new fields, such as Queensland’s Taroom Trough, needs to become an urgent national priority rather than being bogged down endlessly, as would normally now be the case, in environmental assessments and activist lawfare.
Third, we need to expand our capacity to defend and maintain sea lanes via a more capable navy, a recreated Australian National Line, and detailed contingency planning with our military partners.
While it’s quite likely that the US made no formal request for Australian military assistance, given the last-minute nature of its decision-making, once it became clear that hostilities were likely, Australia should have volunteered to help. There’s no doubt the RAAF could have made a significant contribution to the US and Israeli air campaign to destroy the Iranian war machine, had the Albanese government been able to overcome its visceral antipathy to President Donald Trump, tilt against Israel, attachment to the fantasy of “international law”, and fondness for military announcements that make no appreciable difference to our near-term military capability.
Resuming our strategic intimacy with America and accepting that our ongoing need for fossil fuels should trump climate concerns will almost certainly be too much for the ideologues in the current government. Immediate crisis averted, the PM will insist nothing really needs to change – even though almost everything does.

The pond almost regrets that Orbán went down. 

What a relief it was to have the onion muncher abroad, doing his authoritarian suck, rather than being at home doing his mad King Donald suck ...

Here the pond should pause to note that not all the reptiles were sounding triumphant.

The lizard Oz editorialist was sounding quite glum and uncertain ...

Oh dear, King Donald should stop complimenting himself and claiming victory for the umpteenth time?

That surely can't stand. Quick, wheel in Major Mitchell, Zionist in chief for the Australian Daily Zionist News, to compliment King Donald and claim victory for the umpteenth time ...

The header: Iran’s media cheer squad can’t stomach Trump’s success; Donald Trump’s language is erratic, and the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is not without risk. But the truth is that in the first six weeks of the war, Iran has sustained heavy setbacks.

The caption for a snap of the deeply weird, possibly demented, certainly barking mad king: President Donald Trump dances at a roundtable event last week. Picture: AP

Trump's success? 

Only in the richly perverse world of Major Mitchell would a reptile try on that sort of clowning.

So much winning, the pond doesn't know where to begin, but the Major does ...because it's all the fault of weevils and white ants, and if you believe that, you qualify for the Major's "paranoid delusion" award of the week ...

Yes, just like Lord Downer, when in doubt, blame the meejia ...

Reporting about the Iran war is so coloured by media hostility toward US President Donald Trump that almost none of it reflects the truth about Iran’s military frailty, economic malaise or currency collapse.
When Trump responded to Iran’s decision to block the Strait of Hormuz and charge a toll on boats seeking safe passage by deciding that the US could do that too, few journalists thought that it was fair enough, or would even work.
The ABC regularly gives equal airtime to US claims and Iranian denials, even though Iran has lied about its weapons ambitions for decades.
Old leftie reporters on social media who claim the Iranian nuclear program is an Israeli lie should wonder why at last week’s talks in Islamabad the Iranians refused to delay their nuclear program for more than five years. And why possess uranium enriched to 60 per cent if not for weapons?
Trump was wrong not to anticipate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps would try to cause maximum global economic damage by shutting the Strait of Hormuz.
National Review reported on March 14 that General Dan Caine, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, had warned Trump about Hormuz before the war started on February 28.
Journalists have a duty to hold Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to account for failures. But journalists also have a duty to report the truth, and the truth is Iran and its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies are either on their knees or completely defeated, as is the case in Syria.
The New York Times pretends Trump did not have specific war aims. That’s rubbish. Trump has been saying publicly for more than a decade that Iran’s mullahs should never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the timing of the attack was influenced by intelligence suggesting Iran was both rebuilding its weapons stockpiles after the 12-day war the previous June, and was in the process of acquiring hypersonic anti-ship missiles from China.

Liddle Marco? Didn't his contribution amount to a trip to the UFC? US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Picture: AFP

Not that one ... this one, trading on stolen valour, ersatz toughness and boofhead glory ...

 

The Major wasn't worried about any of that.

As usual, he'd managed to rope in assorted weird sources, what with his speciality offering insights via whatever the cat had dragged in ...

Rubio told a press conference on March 2 that Iran was building 100 missiles a month.
“Compare that to the six or seven interceptors that can be built in a month,” he said.
If the US did not attack when it did, Iran would soon have had enough weapons to swamp Israel’s defences and American bases in the region.
In such circumstances, any fair-minded reading of the first six weeks of the war would conclude that Iran had sustained heavy setbacks.
New York Times’ star columnist Thomas Friedman, a supporter of Israel but not of Netanyahu, summed up the approach of much of the media. Speaking on a CNN podcast on April 11, he said he wanted to see the regime in Tehran destroyed but added: “I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings”.
Michael Doran, director of the Centre for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Husdon Institute and a former senior director at the US National Security Council, nailed his assessment of the media and the war in Tablet Magazine on April 14: “Trump has inflicted heavy punishment in return for relatively light consequences, but pundits insist that a masterful Iran is dictating events,” he writes.
Serious journalists in Australia run the line that Iran has Trump on the run.

After that the Major came up with a doozy:

Trump leads a democracy. 

Whatever the status of the banana republic known as the United States is these days, a democracy isn't the first thought that springs to mind.

Kleptocracy, maybe? Has there ever been rule by a bigger bunch of thieves since the days of the robber barons?

Facing midterm elections later this year, he must have an eye on prices Americans face at the petrol pump and in supermarkets. In Iran and Gaza, politicians do not have to care what their people think. Indeed, the survival of their regimes is far more important to them than the wellbeing of their people.
Unlike Western media surrender urgers, expat Iranian analysts thought Trump’s first big mistake was agreeing to a truce and peace talks, which they say gave the Iranians the idea Trump was contemplating backing down on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.
Now the US media’s Iranian cheerleaders can’t see how a US blockade can succeed, but it is.
Doran’s piece outlines how most of the left media criticism of the war is driven by former Barack Obama and Joe Biden Democrats who were involved in attempts to broker better relations between the US and Iran in 2013 during Obama’s presidency. Doran says the political forces opposing Trump and Netanyahu inside the US are an unlikely amalgam of the globalist left with the isolationist right, including people such as Tucker Carlson.

Again if that's success, the pond would hate to see chaos and losing when it comes to actually achieving the strange conglomerate of aims announced at the start of proceedings, including the freeing of the Iranian people, and the end of the mad Mullahs.

Best drag in ancient politicians of the Obama, Biden kind ot take the blame ... Former president Barack Obama. Picture: AFP

So much easier to look back, rather than focus on the mad King and his delusional minions ...

“Along with a common set of enemies in Trump and Netanyahu, the Progressives and America Firsters share a dislike of American global leadership and the use of military force, and therefore they both excuse the behaviour of America’s enemies while blaming it for any conflict,” Doran writes.
Traditional conservatives see Iran as a revolutionary theocracy “committed to the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of the US from the Middle East”. Conservatives believe Iran, China, Russia and North Korea want to “overturn the American led global order’’.
Former Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan argues Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action stabilised Iranian relations until Trump pulled out in his first term in May 2018. Yet Tehran did not start enriching uranium to 60 per cent until April 2021.
“In other words, Iran made this crucial leap towards weaponisation under Biden, not Trump,” Doran writes.
Biden responded with sanctions relief which “funded missiles, drones and proxies”.
Doran says the Biden administration framed Hamas’s October 7 attack in southern Israel as a Palestinian issue.
“This framing advanced the fiction that America was not involved in the war. It also absolved Iran of any responsibility for the mass atrocities and hostage-taking of its proxy, Hamas, thus allowing the (Biden) administration to preserve its diplomatic outreach to Tehran.”
Iran immediately mobilised its entire proxy axis “in an assymetric war against the American Alliance system”.
Iranian-backed forces launched strikes on US bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan as well as on US naval vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
“In any previous era … (this) would have been called open war. The Biden administration called it historic peace.”

As often happens with the reptiles, the Major tried to introduce a few billy goat butts, to hint that he wasn't entirely mad ...

They took the form of "of courses":

Of course Trump’s language is erratic. And of course the US blockade of Hormuz does not come without risks, including a possible Chinese response to US attempts to turn back tankers bound for China. 

But these billy goat butts are just window dressing, and so the Major immediately reversed them with another "butt":

But Trump is correct that the world cannot afford to allow a bunch of medieval fanatics to control a major global sea lane and hold the world economy to ransom.

The pond can't quite see the Major's problem. After all a bunch of medieval - actually old testament biblical - are currently in charge of the government of Israel, and holding King Donald to ransom, in pursuit of ethnic cleansing and a greater Israel, but never mind ... we must just hope it'll all work out, in due course ...

What if the IRGC sees the financial logic of Trump’s move and comes back to the negotiating table? By Wednesday, the UN and Trump thought this imminent.
And by Thursday the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were reporting the US blockade seemed to be working. The Jerusalem Post reported intelligence sources believed Iran could survive without oil sales for less than three months.
The Jerusalem Post reported an unnamed Iranian spokesperson suggesting Iran might let all ships pass the Strait of Hormuz if they stuck to the southern Oman side and the US lifted its blockade. Imagine that. A siege – one of the world’s oldest military strategies – might actually work. How will The New York Times frame that as a Trump negative?

Perhaps first see that it works? And then worry about the framing?

Ain't been that much knockdown glory yet.

The Major should hope it isn't just another mad ploy by a desperate King and minions of the Kegsbreath and Kash kind.

And now, as the pond began with a religious service, time to end with a serve of supper (watch out for the wafers) ...

But there is still hope, because surely we can all agree...