In which the pond takes a road trip, but has time to catch up with Our Henry and prattling Polonius, dissing the Pope in mad King Donald war monger mode ...

 

The pond set out for Melbourne last Thursday, desperate to prove the reptiles wrong, determined to show that an EV could make the trip in a reasonable time.

Alas, things went wrong from the start. There was a five hour queue at Yass, and a slow charger, so add another two hours. The pond had so much time on its hands it attended a double bill at the restored Liberty theatre, and took in a service with Pastor Dave.

At Woodonga, things were so slow, an Islamic family got out the prayer mat and did their thing. Imagine the pond's terror - fancy proposing any reptile witness such proceedings in the fenced off exit to an expired burger store.

Then it was off to the mighty Wang for a top up, but everything was closed. The pond limped into Melbourne in the wee hours with all sense of time lost and a sense that the reptiles would be gloating for years at a nightmare 24 hour folly in a vehicle that cost somewhere north of the family home.

Hang on, hang on, for a real account of what happened, please see below.

In the interim, the pond must earn its keep and offer a message from the reptiles.

It being a disjointed weekend, the best the pond could do when near a computer was make an offering of ancient Henry, taken from the lizard Oz back on Friday.

As a blog of record, the pond doesn't like to miss the hole in bucket man, and this was a Zionist doozy, entirely fitting for the Australian Daily Zionist News:

The header: Pope Leo is guilty of repudiating the ‘just war’ doctrine; That our government has urged Israel to stand down confirms its moral evasiveness; that Pope Leo has done likewise is grievous.

The caption for the wayward Pope: Pope Leo XIV presides over the Easter vigil as part of the Holy Week celebrations, at St Peter's basilica in the Vatican. Picture: AFP

It should go without saying that Our Henry is up for the killing fields, especially when it's the current government of Israel doing the killing, and he was at it full bore in this outing ...

“Peace,” said Saint Augustine, “is so great a good that even in relation to the affairs of earth and our mortal state, nothing is desired with greater longing, nor can anything better be found.” Yet Augustine was no pacifist. He knew that in a fallen world, peace cannot be secured by permitting evil to go unchecked.
That hard truth was conspicuously absent from the Easter interventions of Pope Leo XIV on the wider war in the Middle East, and notably in Lebanon. Absent, too, was any serious engagement with one of Christianity’s greatest intellectual legacies: the doctrine of just war.
The doctrine did not emerge in a vacuum. Its roots lie in Hebrew scripture’s insistence that even war stands under judgment, and that those who wage it are accountable to a higher law.
The narrative of Jephthah in the Book of Judges makes the point: before war is joined, grievances are rehearsed, and an appeal is made to justice. War follows only – yet follows legitimately – when those claims fail, despite efforts to secure redress. Within that framework, wars of self-defence are not merely permitted; repelling an unjust attacker, or one who is imminently so, is a duty.
Complementing the biblical inheritance was the Greek tradition, which, finding its highest expression in Cicero, grounded the doctrine in ethics. War, Cicero argued in criticising conflicts “fought for conquest and glory”, is justified only as a last resort, engaged to correct a grievous wrong. Coining a formulation that would endure through the ages, he added that “the sole excuse for going to war is that we may live in peace” – that is, that the war’s aim must be to remove the adversary’s capacity and will to pursue aggression, allowing a measure of tranquillity to prevail.
Steeped in the Hebrew Bible and profoundly influenced by Cicero, Augustine joined these strands in his account of just war. It was on the foundations he laid that Thomas Aquinas later set out the doctrine’s canonical formulation. Aquinas did not pursue the utopian goal of abolishing war. He recognised that aggression has to be deterred and resisted; his aim was to subject that necessity to the discipline of Christian morality.
War, in the doctrine that would dominate Christian political theology for centuries, could only be legitimate if a properly constituted sovereign authority waged it – one capable of entering into credible peace settlements. There had to be a just cause: the enemy must have committed a wrong that warrants redress, whether through the violation of rights or the refusal to make restitution.
And those who wage war must have a right intention: they must aim to advance good or avert evil – that is, to thwart cruelty, criminality or the lust for domination. Where those conditions are met, the use of force is both sanctioned and morally justified.
Measured against those criteria, Pope Leo’s assessment of the conflict in Lebanon – and his scarcely veiled criticism of Israel – is seriously ill-considered. After all, none of the key facts is in dispute. Ever since the ceasefire came into effect on November 27, 2024, Hezbollah has systematically violated its conditions.

And there you have it. Cicero the Greek joining with Augustine and on with the killing fields, with Our Henry armed with a fierce lance of righteous blood lust.

This sort of blather could have put the pond in the awkward position of attempting to defend the Catholic church, but the church is more than capable of looking after itself, especially when placed up against the likes of mad King Donald and the genocidal Benji (though the pond did enjoy the late night show joke about the Pope and King Donald having a shared interest in hiding sex scandals).

The reptiles flung in a snap which in other times would have found favour in the Catholic Boys' Daily, Pope Leo XIV. Picture: AFP

Our Henry kept raging away ...

Now operating illegally – following the Lebanese government’s ban on its military activities – it has refused to comply with repeated instructions to disarm. Knowing the Lebanese armed forces are too weak and divided to act, Hezbollah’s vice-president, Mahmoud Comati, told Le Monde last month that were any attempt made to dismantle its arsenal, it stood ready to trigger – and triumph in – a devastating civil war.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has sheltered the Iranian ambassador, whom the government had expelled, and – according to Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Nawaf Salam – has issued hundreds of false passports to foreign fighters associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And it has rained missiles and drones on Israel, overwhelmingly directed at purely civilian targets.
Hezbollah’s aim has never been to protect Lebanon – much less the Maronite community. It has instead dismissed the country as “one of the legacies of imperialism”, to be subsumed in the Islamic state it claims will emerge from “the great confrontation with the aggression of Zionists, Crusaders and world arrogance”. As Hassan Nasrallah put it in 2018, the organisation – far from owing loyalty to Lebanon – proudly sees itself as “an arm of the Iranian government and the Lebanese branch of the Guard Corps”.
Nor has it ever shown any interest in peace. Nasrallah repeatedly described Jews in gro-tesquely dehumanising terms as the “descendants of pigs and apes”, and Israelis as “a people of conquerors, occupiers and rapists of the land” who “must be killed”. Just this week, Hezbollah denounced Lebanon’s negotiations with Israel and declared it would not respect any agreement that might be reached.

Uh huh, and then Our Henry really took a sharp turn to the barking paranoid weird:

The moral implications are obvious. It is inconceivable that the Australian government would stand by were Papua New Guinea’s government unable – or unwilling – to act against an armed band launching missiles into Queensland and avowedly intent on exterminating the “settler colonialists” it denounces as “conquerors, occupiers and rapists of the land”. Deploying the ADF to eliminate the threat would be more than a right; it would be an obligation.

Dear sweet long absent lord, that's the best he could do in drumming up support for the outrageous ongoing behaviour of the current government of Israel? Seems so ...

Exactly the same principle applies here. Israel’s intervention is the surest, indeed only, means of forcing the Lebanese state to face the choice it has long evaded: either bring Hezbollah to heel or leave Israel to do so.

That our own government has urged Israel to stand down simply confirms its moral evasiveness and electoral opportunism; that Pope Leo has done likewise amounts to a grievous repudiation of the just war tradition, which has always upheld the right of nations to defend themselves against aggressors, and to prevent them from striking again.
That tradition is no exultation of war. On the contrary, the Book of Isaiah’s great vision of universal peace – “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares … nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” – testifies to an enduring insight: that war, while sometimes necessary, remains a tragedy, to be constrained, justified, and ultimately transcended.
But the just war doctrine recognises that the lions show no intention of lying down with the lambs. Facing up to that reality, it refuses to assert a false moral equivalence between those who murder and those who seek to stop them. And while praying, as does the Pope, for peace, it knows the charnel house of history creates situations in which the only choice is between evils.
Yes, we must attempt to prevent such situations from arising. But when history thrusts them upon us, we cannot merely dismiss all the alternatives as equally bad and believe the gesture washes our hands clean.
The church’s refusal to condemn Hitler’s genocidal war of aggression indelibly stained its reputation. Now, as he addresses a world crying out for moral guidance, the Pope should remember the truth captured in the Midrash, and classically anchored in the story of King Saul: “Those who are merciful to the cruel will, in the end, be cruel to the merciful.” To believe otherwise is not to advance peace. It is to bury it.

Oh dear, he had to play the Hitler card.

So be it.

Our Henry's refusal to condemn the current government of Israel's genocidal war of aggression, its policy of ethnic cleansing, its lust for a greater Israel no matter the human cost, indelibly stains his reputation, but he's not the only Zionist to peddle a pile of righteous tosh in defence of crimes against humanity.

At this point the pond was determined to make a full sermon of it, and turned to that other pompous pedant, Polonius,  for a serve of his prattle ...

The header: ‘Our barbarian’: Why Christians back Donald Trump; From a controversial post to a widening rift with Pope Leo XIV, the US President’s rhetoric reignites debate over religion, war and political power.

The caption for a snap which allowed the reptiles to avoid running that infamous shot showing a doctoring King Donald curing Jon Stewart of what ailed him: US President Donald Trump’s social media post depicting himself as a Christ-like figure drew criticism and was later deleted. Picture: AFP

Who knew that Polonius would take up the Xian white nationalist cause, but stranger things have happened in the lizard Oz...and here we are, and what a broad minded chap he is all of a sudden ...

I was brought up a Catholic but I am by no means offended by President Donald J. Trump’s decision to post on Truth Social an image of himself as a Christ-like figure blessing a sick or dead man, while prayers are said in the presence of a Red Cross female nurse and a US serviceman with the Statue of Liberty in the background and a US Air Force jet and eagles in the sky overhead.
To me it was a joke, of the non-funny kind. In time Trump deleted the post, claiming he thought it depicted him as a doctor. A good try perhaps. 

A good try perhaps? Oh Polonius, Polonius, is there anything else you can add to your comedy stylings, aka an attempt at justifying the mad King's work?

However, at least the President did not blame a staffer.

Sheesh, but at least there then came a minor billy goat butt ...

The post was extraordinarily unwise since some Christians would view such an image as close to blasphemy. And many Christians voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
Working as a political adviser is difficult enough without having to deal with an erratic president’s late night/early morning posts, which are at times explosive. But there is a bigger picture.
As cardinal George Pell wrote on March 30, 2019, in the first volume of his Prison Journal, “Unfortunately, President Trump is a bit of a barbarian, but in some important ways he is ‘our’ (Christian) barbarian.” Pell added that Trump’s “first two appointments to the Supreme Court will slow down the secular advance because the court there has immense power to shape society”.
Despite the fact, after he avoided assassination during a campaign rally at Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024, Trump claimed to have been saved by God, he does not present as a devout Christian. But he has been supportive of Christians, in the US and elsewhere. Much more so than his predecessor, president Joe Biden, who presented as a Catholic.

Ah, of course the Pellists had to turn up. They always do when Polonius is in the room.

Naturally the reptiles lined up a Sky Noise after dark clown to add a MAGA message to Polonius beclowning himself (still no rebranding of the name?)...

Sky News Washington Analyst Annelise Nielsen believes if US President Donald Trump is strategic after public feud with Pope Leo, it will not have a large impact on votes. “I think it was a bit of a distraction tactic. I think he might have been doing this on purpose,” Ms Nielsen told Sky News Australia. “This isn’t the first time he’s had fights with the Pope. “He’s definitely got to manage the evangelical community.”

Naturally Polonius seized the opportunity to take a walk down Catholic memory lane ...

The current President Trump v Pope Leo XIV controversy would not come as a surprise to Australians who lived through, or are aware about, the first half of the 20th century.
When the Labor Party split in the mid-1950s, Daniel Mannix, the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, was criticised for supporting those who split from/were expelled by the Labor Party and formed the Democratic Labor Party. However, little criticism was made by Norman Gilroy, the Catholic archbishop of Sydney, who urged Catholics to remain in the ALP. Both were involved in politics.
The fact is that Christian clergy have always been engaged in politics, to a greater or lesser extent, in a democratic society.
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was born a Muslim and converted to Christianity, pointed out in a perceptive article in the Daily Mail on April 16, on April 9 Leo met US Democratic Party operative David Axelrod.

Ah, it's a conspiracy with the Democrats.

 And possibly with Marina Hyde, busy explaining Is the pope Catholic? JD Vance thinks he has the answer.

What a hoot of a read that was, and here the pond should note that it's spent some recent time with a Catholic priest who exudes some fair content for King Donald, as did many of the Catholics who attended the funeral which took the pond to Melbourne.

Polonius decided on a contrarian strategy, doing his best to take the side of mad King Donald, by explaining it was all just a "defensive" war:

A few day earlier, Leo issued his Easter message, which declared: “Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them!”
Not surprisingly, those words were interpreted as a criticism of the defensive war waged by the US and Israel against the brutal theocracy Iran intent on crushing what the mullahs call “the Great Satan”, that is the United States, along with Israel.
On April 7, Leo spoke against Trump’s threat to destroy Iran. Again, the President used inappropriate language. It was yet more Trump hyperbole. Leo was reported as describing Trump’s threat as “truly unacceptable”.

Um, it happened to be a statement of genocidal intent, the wiping out of an entire tribe, a war crime of the first water, up there with the genocidal Xian god's eradication of all life on earth, but whatever:

On April 13, Trump fired back – even if he managed only two exclamation marks to Leo’s four. He declared “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy”, going on to state that the Pope “thinks it’s ok for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon”. Trump also referred to Leo’s meeting with Axelrod and advised the Pope to “stop catering to the Radical Left”.
This is the familiar argument that the church should stay out of politics. However, Trump has a point. The Catholic Church is not a pacifist society. It has not always stood for peace as in unilateral disarmament.

Oh dear, here we go, here we go ...

For example, the Catholic Church has always accepted a “just war”.

You've endured Our Henry explaining Catholic theology, you might even have endured the couch molesting JD, now stand by for Polonius...

As Gerald O’Collins SJ and Edward G. Farrugia SJ point out in A Concise Dictionary of Theology (Paulist Press), the just war teaching can be traced back to Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Namely, that war must be defensive and in response to unjust aggression, there must be a reasonable chance of success and deliberate attacks on civilians must be avoided and so on. Pope Pius XII never opposed the Allied forces’ war against Nazi Germany.

Hang on, hang on, shouldn't have Our Henry and Polonius compared notes on the matter of the second world war?

It is known that Leo is critical of the Trump administration’s response to unlawful immigration. However, Benedict XVI in October 2012 declared that “every state has the right to regulate migration”. Sure, the current Pope has his political left-of-centre beliefs. But that does not bind Catholics in what the church depicts as ex cathedra pronouncements.
On April 16, Leo called for an unarmed peace. To some, myself included, that sounds a bit like surrender to the likes of Iran, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, North Korea and so on. And then there is Leo’s silence. As Melanie Phillips pointed out in these pages on April 14, Leo “has chosen to ignore totally the deliberate and mass shedding of innocent blood by the Iranian regime, which earlier this year murdered around 40,000 innocent protesters and has spent the last 47 years waging war on America and the West through murderous terrorist atrocities”.
For her part, Ali made the point that “Pope Leo has been conspicuously silent about the systematic persecution of Christians at the hands of Muslims in majority-Muslim countries”. And added that Pope Francis did not explicitly condemn Hamas for its murderous attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
Jesus Christ declared that his kingdom was not of this world. But Christian leaders have rarely followed such a teaching. So, when a pope declares that a president has initiated an unjust war, it stands to reason that there is likely to be a secular response. From the White House and elsewhere.

But he did initiate a pointless, farcical, cruel war, from which he's since been desperately trying to escape, and all but the lunatics at News Corp would recognise it and call it out ...

Whatever happened to the notion of liberating the Iranian people? So much festering dung in the minds of these reptiles.

In short, strange days indeed, and strange company for the likes of Our Henry and Polonius to be keeping, but the pond always knew they had a good deal of war mongering and killing fields in them, and so they are just staying true to their nature ...

And so what really happened on that Melbourne EV trip.

Well it took about 11 hours. Left at 6 am and arrived at 5 pm. The pond could have cheated and said it saw the "welcome to Melbourne" sign at 4.30 pm, but the pond added  a little time to reach the now long gone Loaded Dog pub building, near where the pond once lived. 

Of course you could spend more hours getting to bits of Melbourne, which has now sprawled out everywhere, but current home to old Melbourne home seemed like a reasonable measure.

That compares to the early gas guzzling days when the pond did it in 10 hours, but in later gas guzzling days, what with Goulburn cops, Victorian speed cameras and the need for sensible breaks, the pond took about ... 11 hours. 

It so happens that EV breaks and sensible breaks sort of match up, and the time spent waiting to access an EV charger amounted to ... NIL. 

Of course charging takes longer than guzzling gas, but it makes for good breaks.

At Yass, there wasn't another EV in sight at the charger. The pond did a tour of the main drag, which is hurting badly because the Woollies/Aldi action is up the road - closed businesses, some for sale, a junk store taking up space, an evangelical church at the river end, and only a small K-hub as a mark of conventional retail. 

The pond had a coffee and a treat, and took a look at the restored theatre, which is littered with small shops, and also saw that Pastor Dave still hadn't got rid of his Easter decor.

At Wodonga, there were no EVs until an Islamic family turned up (leaving two other stands still empty) and they did indeed get out a prayer mat and perform their rituals while their indolent son looked on. The pond didn't take a snap - let them pray in peace - but did take a snap of the spot where they prayed.

At the mighty Wang, the pond had time to take in a message from the nearby church, and visit the Wangaratta Arts Centre for a relieving pee, and check out the entertainment on offer. 

It was a dull, tedious trip of the kind the Hume always offers - hence the need for breaks - relieved by a four part podcast about the Klu Klux Klan, which almost felt like readings from the lizard Oz.

And so to the pictorial record of the trip...

First up the desolate, alienated chargers at Yass, starved for company by the chargers up the road. The mighty Yass Soldiers club is in the b/g... (click on to enlarge)

Just time for a coffee and a check of the town, which has hit hard times and has just knocked down a grand old pub, while restoring the local theatre ...

To add insult to injury, the town had bunged on an EV do ...curses, missed it ...

And there really is a Pastor Dave at the river end of the main drag, replete with faux Easter rock scene, just visible through the reflections ...

While at the Wodonga chargers, the pond really did see an Islamic family get out the prayer mat, and set themselves up to do their thing where the white car is in this snap ...

 

It's not exactly an exciting location for anything, but after the ritual they did head off to the nearby servo for whatever, and so must be considered dinkum, because anybody wanting to buy servo junk at inflated prices is doing right by the reptiles' idea of the Oz way of life.

It was also an excellent demonstration that there are many ways to enjoy a charging break.

And for the brief top up at the mighty Wang, the pond did take in a mysterious church message and did visit the arts centre for a pee and for coming attractions in stunning "digitally orchestrated" format ...