By focussing on the lizards of Oz, the pond misses out on many moments of sublime stupidity.
There's Bret Stephens in the both siderist NY Times on 24th March ...
The War Is Going Better Than You Think (* intermittent archive link)
And there he is on 16th June 2026 ...
Iran Found Trump’s Bone Spur (*intermittent archive link)
Relax, it's still going better than you think, and Stephens is there to save the day. It was a right and just war, and the debacle had nothing to do with him, he and other neo cons were just betrayed.
Anyone wanting to find someone who wanted to make the bromancer look like a marvel of consistency and insight couldn't do better than evoking Stephens' wondrous ability to get it wrong.
Speaking of the bromancer, he was at the top of the far right world early in the weekend, safe in his retreat into battering the British, as if his celebration of Brexit had done no harm to that wasteland.
This was just as well, because the One Nationisation of the rag continued at an alarming rate ... and lordy, long absent lordy, the reptiles seemed to think that a Brexit down under might be a jolly good thing, though who we might Brexit from left the pond a tad bewildered.
It was a newbie to the pond, one Nicholas Jensen, allegedly the lizard Oz's commentary editor, and clearly a man of such infinite stupidity that he intended to leave Stephens and the bro in his wake ...
The pond wasted nine precious minutes of its life and still didn't discover who we were supposed to be Brexiting from ... so a teaser trailer will suffice ... and the intermittent archive can do the rest...
One Nation has done what a decade of stagnant politics could not: made Australia’s body politic feel tremulous, urgent and dangerously alive.
By Nicholas Jensen
To get to the Hansonite meat, and a hint of what a Hansonist Brexit might mean, you had to endure a lot of Nick blathering about his time in England in Brexit days and when you finally arrived, it was simple-minded peak capitulation to One Nation and Pauline ... showing just how deep the One Nationisation rot has set in to the rag ...
Hanson is dismissed as having few skills beyond the virtues of plain speaking and authenticity, but that analysis misses a deeper, more salient point. Hanson understands the vernacular of patriotism intuitively; she speaks fluently in the language of values and culture in a way the vast majority of the political establishment cannot. This, perhaps more than anything else, is Hanson’s most formidable asset, her deadliest weapon. She has made it her own and wields it boldly, as evidenced in this week’s National Press Club address.
One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson calls out the Albanese government’s lies during her National Press Club address. “The government is not telling the truth; the Prime Minister and the Treasurer are desperate, and they keep saying that anyone who opposes the budget measures is opposing the opportunity for young people to get into housing,” Ms Hanson said. “Another lie, but how else do you describe it?”
Whenever Anthony Albanese and his colleagues talk earnestly of “progressive patriotism”, the public senses its superficiality. Deep down they suspect it is an ersatz version of patriotism. Increasingly, they see Hanson as offering the real thing. When the Prime Minister says, as he did last week, while attempting to explain the dramatic poll surge for One Nation, that “it’s the economy, stupid”, he wasn’t merely regurgitating a hackneyed political cliche. He was effectively surrendering the battlefield of culture and values to Hanson.
Just now, the shape and character of Australian politics is changing beneath our feet, perhaps forever. Like the populist ruptures that roiled and electrified Brexit Britain and Trump’s America a decade ago, One Nation has injected a new intensity and urgency into our body politic. A stagnant political culture, long starved of big ideas and obsessed with its own material abundance, suddenly feels tremulous and dangerously alive.
Nicholas Jensen is The Australian’s commentary editor.
That's not commentary, that's moronic adulation ...
If the reptiles keep this sort of nonsense up, they'll discover what it's like to be the dog that finally caught the car ...
As for the bromancer, it's always best to remember that he was there for the ruination of Britain by Boris and sundry other frauds, and so to begin the bromancer coverage with another flashback ...
Wait, there's more, even if the steak knives are stuck somewhere in customs...
This stoush symbolises a version of the clash of forces playing out in some measure in every main Western democracy.
By Greg Sheridan
And so on, and the pond apologises for dragging that mouldy old cat out of the grave.
Enough of these preliminaries, time to get down with it, with Count Binface, foxes, raving loonies, and the bromancer, and it helps to retain a sensa huma...
If it's a failed state, where are the bromancing Brexiteers to take the credit for helping conjure up that failure?
Health warning: this is a nine minute read, and it's a real struggle.
The only upside is that it isn't about King Donald and his hapless dealings with Iran, or any of his internal ructions, or even about such follies as the greening and dissolution of the reflecting pool.
The bromancer has realised Faux Noise has made the disunited states a disaster zone, and so he's taken comfort and refuge in the disaster sometimes known as little Brexiting England ...
He will now march to Westminster and the prime ministership.
Keir Starmer is destroyed. Like Macbeth assassinated by Macduff, the march from Burnham Wood spells doom for Labour’s king.
Equally significant, and completely unforeshadowed, was the Conservatives’ win in the Aberdeen South by-election in Scotland, which they took from the Scottish Nationalists.
This is a heroic breakthrough for Kemi Badenoch. It’s the first electoral victory for the Conservatives under her. It’s the first time the Conservatives have won a by-election in five years.
It’s proof, in the only currency that really counts, that Badenoch’s leadership can deliver votes to the Conservatives. It’s a huge boost for the Opposition Leader.
Burnham will take the leadership and get a honeymoon, which may well be short-lived as the problems he will face are intractable if approached from the left, raising the prospect of an early election, though such an option is full of risks. Badenoch is back in the contest in a big way.
Nonetheless, the underlying contradictions remain.
Britain is a nation in terrible if hopefully temporary decline, while two fierce civil wars are being fought before the Great War of the two opposing trends of British society comes into full conflict.
Whatever the turbulence following this week’s by-elections, the structures of deep British division have been building for years and could well explode.
There’s a civil war on the left and a civil war on the right. Like all civil wars, it divides families. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the immensely urbane, courteous and decent former senior cabinet minister under Boris Johnson, the soul of the conservative Conservative, finds that his teenage daughter has joined Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
As the Moggster will later return, can the pond please borrow from John Crace, who described him as "the idiot's idea of a thinking man", as in Rees-Mogg breaks broken news to a horrified house:
Of the withdrawal agreement bill there was no sign. “They seek it here, they seek it there,” Rees-Mogg laughed, working himself up into a state of visible arousal at his own Divine Comedy. For a man who used to pride himself on his sincerity and probity, lying and S&M cosplay have become second nature. He must have a very accommodating arrangement with the priest at confession.
There’s civil war on the left side of politics too. The UK Greens are the most extreme left-wing green party in the democratic world. Their leader, Zack Polanski, one of the weirdest political leaders in captivity (he was previously a hypnotist who thought he could enlarge women’s breasts), is seriously challenged for the leadership because he’s too “pro-Zionist”. But these are bagatelles. Both civil wars involve the biggest political battalions.
Ancient history, and so it's back to the idiot thinking he's in the company of a thinking men ...
On the left, Keir Starmer is a dead Prime Minister walking. His party, with a landslide majority, is in a mess. All the challengers, Andy Burnham and the others, have accommodated the idea of moving further to the left.
But there’s a raging civil war on the left. Labour’s primary vote is low, way behind the right-wing Reform. A strong challenge to Labour is being mounted by Polanski’s Green Party. The UK Greens are extreme and repellent. They differ from the Australian Greens in one key respect. They’ve become the quasi-Islamist party. The Greens are not only the party of inner-city middle-class white radicals, like most Green parties, they’ve become the party of Islamist solidarity and rage.
The reptiles flung in a snap ...Sir Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham at Old Trafford in May. Picture: Getty
Thank the long absent lord the English retain a sensa huma and that the second season of Ludwig is due in August ...
It can't be that bad. That furry suit must have cost a motza ... and as for the lavish expenditure on the dust bin and the silver cape, it's a country full of luxury items...
The left’s third big force is the radical nationalists. In the devolved “home nations”, left-wing separatist nationalists rule – the Scottish Nationalist Party in Edinburgh, Plaid Cymru in Cardiff and Sinn Fein in Belfast. Each is committed to leaving the UK. Rees-Mogg fears the next election could deliver a “Frankenstein coalition of Labour, the Greens and the Nationalists”.
The SNP would have great leverage. Scotland could realistically break away from the UK. Vast social change, structural political and power transformations, could be enacted to make reversal of left hegemony extremely difficult. The stakes are astronomical.
Reform and the battle for the right
But equally there’s a life-and-death civil war on the right. Kemi Badenoch is doing a spectacularly good job leading the Conservatives. But the party is still a long way behind Reform, and in many polls Labour as well. It holds 116 of 650 House of Commons seats. Informal estimates suggest in an election today it could lose a third of them. And that’s with a popular leader.
People are re-examining the 1930s classic The Strange Death of Liberal England. The Liberals had been a giant political party – of legends William Gladstone, Herbert Asquith, David Lloyd George. Yet they were eclipsed and politics became primarily a fight between the new Labour Party and the Conservatives.
The party threatening to displace Tories today is Farage’s Reform, which is populist, dynamic, growing its membership rapidly (270,000 members now) and has been leading national polls for more than a year.
But Reform itself is being challenged on the right by the new upstart party Restore, led by Rupert Lowe, 68, a former businessman who was previously elected as a Reform MP. Many of Restore’s policies are much the same as those of Reform and the Conservatives but its rhetoric is frequently more extreme. There are reports that white supremacists and neo-Nazis donate to Restore.
Lowe and Farage fell out spectacularly and their personal enmity is an important dynamic of politics now. Restore could score enough votes to cost Reform dozens of parliamentary seats in Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system.
Nonetheless, some pundits believe an election today would make Reform the biggest party and the Conservatives the second largest, with the two forming a governing coalition. However, there’s every chance the right’s divisions, lack of a deep organisational base and supportive institutions, not least government institutions, could cost it government.
The reptiles added to the burden with AV distractions ... Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage claims the British public is increasingly aware of a “two-tier Britain”, adding that the country now faces a profound “trust issue” with its politicians. “You haven’t just got an economic crisis, you haven’t just got a social crisis … but you’ve also got now a trust issue,” Mr Farage told Sky News host Paul Murray. “People don’t trust politics, people don’t trust politicians. “After the awful cases, the attempted beheading in Belfast, the horrible death of that young student in Southampton, people now realise we’re living in two-tier Britain. “We’re now being judged by our ethnicity and some groups are treated with more favour than others. This is really, really serious; there couldn’t be anything more divisive in society.”
There couldn't be anything more divisive than Nige, which is why a sensa huma and a British appreciation of irony is essential ... (do Reform and Restore ever play the Monty Python splitters game?)
For a start, this is a judgment widely shared in Britain itself.
Consider left-wing magazine The New Statesman. It detests Tories, Reform and right-wingers, it typically backs Labour governments. It listed a cover story recently under the heading: “The failed state”. On its cover ran the strapline: “Everything is broken. Nothing changes. Voters are mad as hell.”
British welfare spending has run completely out of control. It now exceeds the total revenue generated by income tax. The unemployment rate fell this week by 0.1 per cent to 4.9 per cent. That seems modestly encouraging. But there are a million youngsters, aged 18 to 24, engaged in neither employment nor education or training. While unemployment dropped a tiny fraction, the actual number of people getting pay dropped by tens of thousands.
Britain has a national debt roughly equivalent to its gross national product. It pays nearly twice as much on interest as on its defence budget. This is partly because of the debilitating effects of a plainly insane welfare system. Two people living together can, if they shrewdly maximise their benefits, receive the equivalent of more than £70,000 ($131,700) a year in welfare, twice the average wage. That’s a huge disincentive to work. The welfare bill is projected at £400bn by decade’s end.
Sick and tired
Through the week a doctor recounted in the press serving for years on panels reviewing people’s claims to special benefits. One rule for a maximum benefit was not being able to walk independently for 20m. He would watch people park their cars 100m down the road, walk jauntily to their interview, state they were unable to walk 20m and receive maximum benefits. People can claim mental distress on Zoom interviews. Social media schools them well on what to say and typically they get the benefits. Much of this is an unresolved hangover from disastrous Covid measures.
The breakdown of the traditional family has fiscal consequences. On any given day there are 13,000 people, who are not sick enough to be in hospital but for whom there are inadequate care arrangements at home, occupying hospital beds in the UK. Almost everything the family once did, the state now does, but it does it at enormous cost and very badly.
Britain has been definitively unable to control illegal immigration. In the 12 months to March this year, 44,000 immigrants arrived illegally. Nearly 100,000 asylum-seekers are accommodated in hotels or group houses paid for by government. This greatly angers local residents. It also angers those trying to get social housing. It’s one of the main issues driving voters directly from Labour to Reform.
Britain has also gone backwards on defence capability. It had a full-time professional army of 170,000 under Margaret Thatcher, 100,000 under Gordon Brown and just 70,000 today. John Healey resigned as defence secretary last week because Starmer, having failed to make puny savings in the welfare budget, could not secure adequate funds for defence. Al Carns, the armed forces minister who also resigned, wrote: “Britain spent a decade choosing to be smaller in the world.”
I find these London clubs full of mysterious narrow corridors, quaint and poky spaces, walls decorated with spectacular paintings and an atmosphere of remarkable good cheer. Whether for reasons of privacy, or to spare members witnessing an act of journalism, Orr and I speak in a small, curtained space.
At this point, the pond should note that Orr is barking mad, and a loon who move in the Peter Thiel/JD Vance circle of couch-molesting weirdness.
Peter Jukes and Nafeez Ahmed reveal how James Orr, Nigel Farage’s new head of policy is the key religious and ideological linkman for Palantir’s Peter Thiel and Sir Paul Marshall’s GB News
...the story of Dr James Orr, the lawyer turned theologian, sits at the centre of a clandestine transatlantic nexus of faith, finance, think tanks, seminars and seminaries, media companies and conference events — and an apparently catastrophic view of politics.
The reptiles then showed a revealing snap ...The writer Greg Sheridan with James Orr, head of Reform’s policy unit, at the Marks Club of Mayfair in London. Picture: Supplied
Was that the best they had?
The bromancer looks terrible, awful slumped over posture, eyes barely open, ragged and depleted, as if entering end times, making the pond wonder if any mockery was worth it, as nature ravaged the man...
Second thoughts, he's still poisoning the well ...
Much of the mess in these issues was caused by the Conservatives in their 14 years in government. Theresa May took the insane step of legislating a hard net-zero target by 2050, which has given Britain the highest domestic energy prices in the world.
Voters had been hugely motivated to take back control of immigration. This was a vital factor in the Brexit vote that saw Britain leave the EU. Yet in one year under Johnson, in the post-Covid rebound, just under a million immigrants arrived.
In the nick of time there came a relieving AV distraction ... Andy Burnham said Labour had a “final chance to change” after his decisive win in the Makerfield by-election set up a showdown with Sir Keir Starmer. Allies of Mr Burnham called on the Prime Minister to hand over power after he defied national trends to increase Labour’s share of the vote in a seat where Nigel Farage’s Reform UK made sweeping gains in last month’s local elections. The Prime Minister has insisted he will not quit and will fight any leadership challenge.
The bromancer kept mining this Orr for loony ore ...
Such European entanglements have prevented Britain from running the kind of border control policies that enjoy settled bipartisan support in Australia. Orr’s message on the Tories is simple. They had 14 years to deliver on these issues but they governed more like a moderate Labour Party than as Conservatives. Badenoch herself once said to me that the problem with the Tories in their last term in office was that they “talked right but governed left”.
Orr outlines a wide range of Reform’s proposed spending cuts, everything from civil service numbers to foreign aid and the whole vast panoply of net zero subsidies and expenditures.
If Reform does gain government, its vulnerabilities will be psychodramas, personality clashes and a general lack of people who know how government runs. But its intent is clear: the root-and-branch transformation of British government and society.
Tories still in the hunt
Yet the Tories are by no means out of the hunt. Badenoch is the most popular political leader in Britain. She is passionately committed to ending net zero, withdrawing from the ECHR, combating identity politics, restoring pride in British history – all the things Reform wants. And she pushed for these when she was a Conservative minister.
Rees-Mogg, one of the most impressive Conservative thinkers (who lost his seat at the last election), argues for a Conservative-Reform electoral alliance. He is the most charming and courteous of men and explains his thinking to me over lunch at the more staid Boodles Club near Piccadilly (though in accordance with club rules, our formal interview takes place off-site).
He points out that if you extrapolated the local elections to national results, you would see Reform on perhaps 27 per cent and Conservatives on 20 per cent. Aggregated, that’s potentially landslide territory for the right. He thinks the two parties should avoid running against each other, with each concentrating on their geographic zones of strength.
A most impressive thinker? Perhaps for the idiot's idiot ...
Cue another John Crace sketch from ancient times...
Leader of the house’s unctuous insincerity fails to hide the fact he hasn’t a clue what’s going on
But time and again Rees-Mogg argued otherwise. “Oh, no, no, no, no,” he said, chuckling to himself while oozing unctuous insincerity. “The honourable member had referred to ‘running a bath’ when surely he meant ‘drawing a bath’.” Weirdly, Rees-Mogg labours under the impression that this kind of bantz is clever. One can only imagine he rewatches his greatest hits on the BBC’s Parliament channel alone at night in a state of mild sexual arousal. Whatever gets you off.
Ancient times, ancient Moggie follies.
Cue a snap of the Moggster lad with his squeeze, Jacob Rees-Mogg and wife Helena arrive as far right activist Tommy Robinson addresses the Oxford Union at the Oxford University on June 17. Picture: Getty
It was beyond time for the bromancer to wrap up proceedings, and to reveal that he was in fact a contra player and performer rather than a journalist ...
Why are people so ready to abandon the traditional parties?
Rees-Mogg: “People feel they haven’t had sensible governments, or governments that take notice of them. They feel that they’ve had governments which are more concerned with international agreements and which have not stood up for them (the British people).”
You get the sense that British politics can’t go on as it is because the nation is being governed so poorly. But there is a fundamental contradiction between the left-wing view of Britain and the conservative view of Britain. The clash will get more intense. Inevitably there will be some compromise and some qualified results. But I get the sense there is big political conflict ahead, and that over the next five to 10 years one side of this argument or the other will prevail convincingly.
Man the battle stations.
At least it was a different kind of swamp ...
What else?
Well for the sake of completeness, the pond should report that the dog botherer was this week performing Australian Daily Zionist News duties...
The attack has reshaped the landscape, but major parties haven’t grasped what is coming.
By Chris Kenny
Associate Editor (National Affairs)
The pond suspects a greater Israel is coming, with the ADZN cheering on the ethnic cleansing.
It's there at the intermittent archive for those who want it, but the pond preferred as a bonus the alarming prospect of the Ughmann in a sadomasochistic fervour about a good caning ...
The header: Urge to correct the wicked and improve the good has moved from classroom to cabinet room
Smoking is merely one of a growing catalogue of habits, preferences and personal choices that governments have decided require official supervision.
The caption for the weird illustration: There are large and small campaigns against vaping, drinking, gambling, plastic bags, plastic straws, gas appliances, petrol and diesel cars, wood heaters and excessive air travel.
This Ughmann outing took a bigly six minutes, and indulged his tragic habit of dwelling in the past, so that the hive mind could play the role of shrink, and watch as he lay on the couch and unburdened himself of traumatic childhood memories.
The tedium of it all ...
One of the ways it was worse was the routine flogging of children, sometimes for no apparent reason. All manner of weapons were deployed for this task, from sticks to canes to leather straps.
Being an army brat who moved every two years during primary school, I encountered all these tools of torment in the education systems of Queensland (Brisbane, then Townsville), the ACT (twice) and South Australia. Routine interstate moves also highlighted the foibles of federation because, much like rail gauges, each jurisdiction had decided to chart its own course on everything from school holidays to handwriting.
Each had its own cursive writing workbook where you had to carefully copy the local Platonic ideal of each upper and lower-case letter and were flogged for deviating too far from the norm.
There were some similarities between states but more than enough differences to make it easy to fall at the hurdles of running writing. A lot of the trouble revolved around the correct way to render the lower-case “r” and “f”, as there were three different takes in three different states. Arguing that you had just mastered the loop on the left of the “r” in Townsville was met with scorn in the Adelaide Hills hamlet of Woodside, where no such loop existed. There was no dispensation for delivering a perfect South Australian “f” in Canberra, where the NSW cursive bible ruled.
By the time our family arrived in the ACT in 1971, having passed through the education systems of Queensland and South Australia in the space of a single year, my handwriting had become an ecumenical litany of letters, some of my own invention.
A Catholic boys primary school in the early 70s was no place for innovation. I got an inkling of what was in store when Mum took my older brother and me shopping for the school uniform. The only good thing about the SA public school we had just left was the lax dress code, where students could wear civvies like jeans and T-shirts.
The pond trusts this Freudian indulgence has helped the Ughmann, as the pond bit its tongue about its time with the Dominican nuns, and a snap revealed where all this was heading ...The state’s determination to rid the nation of smoking has pitched excise duties so high they have spawned a thriving black market in contraband fags.
Smoking! Shades of the IPA's glory days.
As the Ughmann has set the Freudian pace, here's a few pond memories.
Smoking managed to kill off one grandfather with lung cancer, in a way that the Somme trenches hadn't managed. Lung cancer also killed off the other one.
Emphysema killed off the pond's father, and made his final years a living hell by way of an inability to breathe. The pond can still vividly remember another uncle dying of COPD, struggling, gasping, as he tried to suck in air, only to fail at that task a few days later.
Since then the pond has taken the view that the cost of tending to people doing themselves harm should always be factored in to the equation.
It's not about their health, it's about the cost they inflict on others, much the same as if you decide to drive on the wrong side of the road, take out assorted vehicles and people, and expect insurance will save you from any penalty.
Nah, many might be in the insurance pool, but we also have a duty to ding you for your naughty ways.
Meanwhile, there's still more personal stuff from the Ughmann to endure before we get there, as the pond idly wondered if the Ughmann still kept smoking, still kept doing himself self-harm, and had begun to be ravaged by all the diseases smoking can give you. Did he ever use public health care? Or did he have the decency to pay for private insurance and burden like-minded chums/
Never mind, he really is the perfect example of a mind ruined by Catholicism ...
The blazer seemed to hail from Oxbridge rowing clubs, and the shorts and long socks were drawn from an age when exposing a boy’s knees to sub-zero winter days was deemed character-building.
In the 70s, Marist College enforced its dress code with military rigour. Floggings for uniform violations were routine. Punishments flowed if your cap was askew or missing a badge, if your tie was not straight, if you did not have elastic garters to hold up your socks, and all these fashion crimes were measured in blows counted from one to six of the best.
Uniform misdemeanours were just the tip of an iceberg of infractions for which the rod was liberally employed. If some anonymous crime was discovered, the culprits were told to out themselves or risk collective punishment being dispensed to the whole class.
At least one of the brothers understood that the punishment of the innocent with the guilty required an explanation and excused it with the aphorism that it “makes the good boys better and the bad boys good”.
Perhaps that was true for some. What it did for others, like me, was develop a kind of criminal genius for evading capture and a firm conviction that the burden of proving any alleged malfeasance rested with the prosecution.
And where did all this lead? Yes, to that pathetic delusion of boys that somehow smoking was exotic, and made them the summit of masculinity and charm, bad boys on the prowl, looking for bad times, or more likely, tragic nerds wondering if a smoke might end their incel days ...
There were several places around the school grounds where you could smoke unseen, but taking risks was part of the fun of it.
One morning the PA crackled to life and there was a school-wide message from the principal.
“Yesterday on the bus to Rivett some boys were seen smoking,” he said. “We have your names. If you come down to the office now I will go easy on you. But if I have to come and get you then the consequences will be much worse.”
I watched in amazement as two boys stood and volunteered themselves for the gallows. I thought, “If you have got my name you can come and get me.”
No one ever came.
We now live in more enlightened times when it comes to the management of children. Though sparing the rod does seem to have spoiled more than the odd child, I would not endorse a return to the era when terror was considered an essential teaching aid.
The larger problem now is that state and federal governments have decided to infantilise us all, with all manner of legislative encouragement to ensure we make better choices and become better humans in service of the state.
The same urge to correct the wicked and improve the good has moved from the classroom to the cabinet room.
The state’s determination to rid the nation of smoking sprang from the laudable aim of preventing unnecessary deaths. But in pursuing that goal the federal government has pitched excise duties so high they have spawned a thriving black market in contraband fags that is hosing money into the coffers of organised crime.
The reptiles introduced a snap to remind the hive mind that this was an IPA/big tobacco view of the world ... Tobacco smugglers have been stripped of more than 2.5 billion cigarettes and thousands of tonnes of tobacco at the nation’s borders, costing the federal government more than $4 billion in lost duty.
How they've fought every step of the way, from labelling to availability, all so they can kill of their customers, but not before bleeding them dry ...
The Ughmann continued his crusade, with the pond wondering whether he might get on to crusading about the urgent need to liberalise the availability of crack and other forms of cocaine, with perhaps a little heroin and morphine for good measure (how unfair that the pond has to head to hospital to get a shot of morphine. And where are the soothing gummies?):
Any sensible government would recognise this error and correct it. But no, like a temperance crusader who mistakes every unintended consequence for proof that he has not gone far enough, the state remains committed to the cause.
Smoking is merely one of a growing catalogue of habits, preferences and personal choices that governments have decided require official supervision.
There are also large and small campaigns against vaping, drinking, gambling, plastic bags, plastic straws, gas appliances, petrol and diesel cars, wood heaters and excessive air travel.
The problem is not any individual measure. It is the cumulative effect. Everywhere you turn there is some government, regulator, department, authority, commission, agency or taxpayer-funded activist hectoring you about how you should live, what you should drive, what you should eat, how you should heat your home, how much water you should use and how often you should fly.
From the desire to kill everyone with lung cancer or other diseases related to smoking, the Ughmann manages to turn himself into a terrified fear monger, alarmed on many levels ...
In the UK the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government, says to help achieve stringent new climate targets Britons will have to eat 25 per cent less meat. In a statement from the British Energy Minister’s office the public is assured these targets will succeed “without telling people how to live or behave”.
That, of course, is a lie. The state will find ways of making Britons comply in the task of saving the planet one vegan burger at a time. It is already succeeding by conjuring an economic environment in which many people can’t afford meat.
We are now living with the soft despotism Alexis de Tocqueville feared was the destination of democracies.
Hang on, hang on, it's the British government that's conjuring an economic environment simply to deny punters meat in their diets?
What does the Ughmann make of King Donald and his minions, devoted climate science denialists all, who nonetheless have managed to produce a spike in meat prices?
Soaring US beef prices likely to rise further thanks to trade tensions and disease outbreaks
You don't have to accept climate science to cause a rise in beef prices, but the reptiles carried on being alarmed ...In Australia, a Climate Change Authority report says shifting from red meat to other protein sources could help reduce emissions. Picture: Zoe Phillips
Eek, a meaningful snap of a moo cow, which might fit into the pond's thesis on the place of moo cows in cinema (cf Twister)
In the final gobbet, the Ughmann successfully managed to carry on like a pork chop ...
“It would resemble paternal power if, like it, it had as a goal to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary it seeks only to fix them irrevocably in childhood,” he wrote.
“After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them …
“Habitually it is moderate, benevolent, regular and humane; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannise, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
As CS Lewis wrote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”
May be better to live under robber barons? But then CS Lewis was always a silly man, scribbling silly Xian fairy stories, full of moral busybody-ness and Xian triumphalism ...
The pond would rather have lived in the time of prohibition, and the attempts by omnipotent banners to take grog away from punters.
At least then you got Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, celebrating the joys of gay marriage.
And after a goodly time away from King Donald, trust the immortal Rowe to remind the pond of the madness that the reptiles have helped produce ...
Keep that sensa huma ...
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