In which the pond has its usual quality Polonial time - this is a conservative-full zone - and gives the Angelic one and the lizard Oz editorialist a jolly good capping ...

The pond is again getting very tired of the monocultural diet inflicted on it by the lizard Oz hive mind.

It never takes long for the ennui to set in - it's a bit like being made to swallow Hollywood swill.

Yesterday the pond was forced to endure Spielberg's Disclosure Day, a film set in a purported present, but determinedly back in the 1980s, with endless amounts of fake lens flare and a plot about as credible as the UFO files released by mad King Donald in order to distract from the Epstein files.

Apart from the usual (ye ancient cats and dogs, not Roswell, not a crop circle), the pond objected to the portrait  of the greys, what with any viewer of People of Earth knowing that the greys are inclined to human abductions and anal probes.

Instead we're supposed to believe that a Catholic nun represents the people of earth in welcoming an alien invasion, because of "empathy", perhaps meant as a Spielbergian retort to mad King Donald.

Benevolent Catholics always make the pond nervous, and after a risible train crash stunt the pond lost all interest, especially as the big reveal happens in a replica of a small town Norman Rockwell type house - so E.T. Spielberg - and on broadcast television, as if the internet and social media hadn't been invented. That way too long routine perfectly suited the film's 1980s feel, but enough already. (Okay, maybe it was more 1977 given the visual references to Close Encounters).

When are we going to see a real movie, funded by a real man, with real stars and oodles of creatives behind the camera? Must we wait until Xmas?

Speaking of empathy, the pond feels entirely righteous not having it when it comes to the hive mind.

The pond found it extremely difficult to compile enough reptiles for its Sunday meditation, not helped by Bernie carrying on the lizard Oz TG jihad ...

The trans lobby says it saves kids. The evidence says otherwise
Australia still offers puberty blockers to children as countries like the UK, Finland and Sweden restrict them, and our national review remains unfinished.
By Bernard Lane

The pond never goes there, and is still haunted by a TG friend's anecdotes about the way she was tortured with electroshock treatment, and suffered much abuse at the hands of the Catholic church, called in to cast out her demons by way of "empathetic" exorcisms.

She was only saved from all this when she ran across a sympathetic shrink, and thereafter managed a varied and successful career, but still hasn't come out, because there's still so much "empathy" to hand in the land.

So what's Lane's credentials for rabbiting on about TG folk?

Bernard Lane is a former senior journalist with The Australian and publishes the Gender Clinic News Substack.

Oh he was a journo and now he publishes a substack obsessed with TG folk. Say no more. Just right for the lizard Oz TG jihad.

So much empathy.

Perhaps "empathy" should be the theme of the day, because this day Polonius's prattle displays much empathy towards Benji's barking mad theocratic culture and none at all to those Palestinians being ethnically cleansed from Gaza and the West Bank (not to mention the Lebanese being kicked out of south Lebanon, and the ones being bombed elsewhere):

The header: How the ABC and top universities turned a blind eye to antisemitism; Evidence exposes how Australia’s public broadcaster and elite universities allowed a culture of denial and ideological groupthink to fester.

The caption for the man with the furtive air of a devious prevert, or so the portrait would suggest: University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott offered apologies during senate and royal commission hearings for failing to dismantle antisemitic campus encampments earlier. Picture: NewsWire / Josie Hayden

Polonius spent a bigly four minutes rabbiting on in his prattle in a way entirely consistent with the current Australian Daily Zionist News jihad, and with not another visual interruption for the rant ... 

The ABC and the Group of Eight universities (Adelaide University, Australian National University, University of Melbourne, Monash University, University of Queensland, University of Sydney, University of NSW and University of Western Australia) like to present themselves as the leading intellectual and cultural institutions in Australia.
Yet evidence presented to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, along with other sources, indicates that both the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster and taxpayer-subsidised major universities have failed to act to thwart or reduce antisemitism in their areas of responsibility.
As I wrote in these pages before the terrorist attack on southern Israel by the Islamist terrorist group Hamas on October 7, 2023, antisemitism was rapidly increasing in Australia, particularly in the capital cities of Melbourne and Sydney.
On October 9, 2023, an unauthorised march to the Sydney Opera House witnessed what American writer Mark Levin has termed the Marxist-Islamist Alliance chanting “Where’s the Jews” or perhaps “Gas the Jews”. There is scant difference. This was before Israel went to war against Hamas in Gaza.

Mark Levin?

The pond decided to break a long standing rule just for the comedic effect ...

Okay, it's more Ben than Mark, it's more broken clock syndrome, but you could waste an eternity of time watching barking mad far right fundamentalists go at each other over the ethnic cleansing of Gaza ..

Back to Polonius, as he builds to an incredible suck:

And then, on December 14, 2025, there was the Bondi massacre where it is alleged that radical Islamists killed 15 innocent civilians who were celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Australia will never fully recover from this massacre of the innocents. Nor will many Australians ever feel safe again.
What has been notable about events in Australia since October 7, 2023, is that so few Australians publicly stood up for the Australian Jewish community. It happens to be a small group of over 100,000 but it has brave and articulate leaders.
Needless to say, the News Corp print media stood up – as did Sky News. 

What a classic suck, as if conducting a never-ending jihad of their own was more than a match for a funded-by-Benji Hamas jihad (look it up)...

But the rest of the mainstream media was relatively quiet – at least until the Bondi massacre – as synagogues were firebombed and bollards were constructed outside Jewish schools and childcare centres.
What about Australia’s academics? Many who might have spoken up were silent while others were supporting the Marxist-radical Islamist demonstrators.

It being a Polonial rant, eventually it transpires that it's all the fault of the ABC. Connoisseurs of Polonius-speak might wonder if it will lead to one of his classic lines, always present thanks to his keyboard shortcut:

What about the ABC? Four Corners – which presents as Australia’s leading current affairs program – did not devote one episode to antisemitism. Although it did cover the neo-Nazi movement, which is a minor part of the antisemitism problem in Australia.
I first met Mark Scott, vice-chancellor of Sydney University, many years ago. He is a nice, decent person. And that may be the problem.
In September 2024, Scott admitted he had failed Sydney University students and staff. Appearing before the Senate committee, Scott said that testimonials by Sydney University students and staff who were victims of acts of antisemitism on campus “were heartbreaking and unacceptable” and added that he was “sorry”.
Last week Scott gave evidence to the royal commission headed by former High Court judge Virginia Bell SC. He again declared his sorrow that he had not acted sooner to remove the encampment from the university campus. But Scott remains in office.
Compare and contrast Jennifer Westacott, the hands-on chancellor of Western Sydney University, which is not one of the Go8. She is the stand-out university administrator in thwarting antisemitism on the university’s campus. She is both nice and strong.
The problem with the Scott-managed university in recent years, apart from the antisemitic violence, is the lack of viewpoint diversity. Supporters of Israel’s right to exist within secure borders were silenced, including vocal opponents of antisemitism, physically or by intimidation.
For 10 years before he took up his present job, Scott was the ABC’s managing director and editor-in-chief. When he started this position, Scott let it be known that he intended to bring about greater diversity with respect to the public broadcaster’s news and current affairs coverage. He said as much when he addressed The Sydney Institute in October 2006.
But nothing happened. Like many of his ABC predecessors and successors, Scott was seduced by the fashionable left-wing culture that pervades the organisa­tion. He inherited a media organisation that lacked viewpoint diversity and when he departed nothing much had changed.

"Viewpoint diversity"?

How incredibly disappointing.

Everyone knows that the mantra should be a reference to a "conservative-free zone", as in ...

The fact is that over the years the ABC has lost many of its traditional social and political conservatives to other media outlets – including Sky News. That’s the inevitable fate of a conservative-free zone media outlet in a democracy. (Inevitable fate of ABC’s conservative-free zone: boring)

It goes without saying that the most crucial conservative the ABC lost was Polonius himself, with the bitterness likely never to leave him.

Now back to praising the hive mind and deploring the cardigan wearers.

This was evident when current ABC chairman Kim Williams was interviewed last week on Sky News’ The Kenny Report. When asked by Chris Kenny to name some right-of-centre presenters on the public broadcaster to match the plethora of left-of-centre ones, Williams said “from time to time” there had been some. But he could only think of Tom Switzer, who has not been an ABC presenter for two years.
John Lyons, the ABC’s Americas editor, set the tone for the organisation’s coverage of the US-Iran war. On March 1 this year he said Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “driven” US President Donald Trump to initiate hostilities. We now know, courtesy of the book Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, that the final decision was made by Trump.

Point of order muh lud.

Trump might have made the decision, but Benji pushed him to it.

Here's a quote from the both siderist NY Times, written by none other than Haberman and Swan ...6 Takeaways From the Story of Trump’s Decision to Go to War With Iran

Netanyahu made a detailed pitch for war to Trump and his team in the Situation Room.

Sitting across from Mr. Trump in the Situation Room — a venue rarely used for in-person sessions with foreign leaders — Mr. Netanyahu made an hourlong presentation to the president and his top aides on Feb. 11. He argued that Iran was ripe for regime change and that a joint U.S.-Israeli campaign could bring down the Islamic Republic. At one point, he played a video that included a montage of figures who could lead Iran if the theocratic government fell. Among them was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah.
The Israeli leader and his advisers laid out what they portrayed as near-certain victory: Iran’s missile program destroyed in weeks, the Strait of Hormuz kept open and minimal retaliation against American interests. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, could help foment an uprising inside Iran to finish the job.
Mr. Trump’s response was swift and appeared approving to most in the room. Sounds good to me, he told the prime minister.

U.S. intelligence officials called Netanyahu’s regime-change scenarios “farcical.”

U.S. analysts scrambled overnight to assess what Mr. Netanyahu had presented. Their conclusions, delivered the next day in another Situation Room meeting, were blunt.
The first two objectives laid out in the Israeli pitch — killing the ayatollah and crippling Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors — were achievable, U.S. intelligence officials concluded. The second two goals presented by Mr. Netanyahu and his team — a popular uprising inside Iran and the replacement of the Islamic government by a new secular leader — were not. The C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, used a single word to describe the regime-change scenarios: “farcical.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio translated, “In other words, it’s bullshit.”
Mr. Trump absorbed the assessment — and moved past it. Regime change, he said, would be “their problem.” His interest in killing Iran’s top leaders and dismantling its military remained undimmed.

And given this inaccurate Polonial reporting, it takes incredible chutzpah for Polonius to berate the ABC for inaccurate reporting, but that's our Polonius ...

The unintended consequence of such inaccurate reporting by a critic of contemporary Israel is to play into the hands of the increasing number of antisemites in our midst. Lyons is not an antisemite but he is an Israel antagonist. There is no counterpoint to Lyons within the ABC.
It’s the anti-Israel ethos within the public broadcaster that leads to mistakes. The royal commission has heard that it took the ABC more than a week to correct (only online, I understand) a report it ran claiming 14,000 babies “will die” in Gaza within 48 hours unless the UN could reach them.
I heard this live on May 21, 2025, and just knew it was false. But ABC producers ran this BBC report because they believed what they wanted to believe. Once again, such false reporting has the unintended consequence of increasing antisemitism.
ABC management invariably goes into denial when defending its patch. This was the case when ABC editorial director Gavin Fang appeared before the royal commission on July 9 – although he did acknowledge some mistakes. And when Williams spoke to Kenny on July 16. Williams deserves praise for having the courage to address an ABC critic in the media – a rare occasion. Also, Scott has apologised for his failure at Sydney University.
However, in a sense it’s all too late. When the Go8 and the ABC needed to be heard speaking out for viewpoint diversity against antisemitism, there was silence.

For a man who berates the ABC for wanting to believe, this incredible ability to believe in the lizard Oz jihad in support of a fundamentalist theocracy is a remarkable piece of work.

Here, have a 'toon break ...

With Polonius out of the way, the pond struggled to find a bonus.

The pond briefly thought of snappy Tom...

Economic heavyweights warn Labor is ignoring Australia’s dire productivity crisis
While the rest of the world got richer after the pandemic, Australians got poorer – and Labor’s had almost nothing to say about it.
By Tom Dusevic

But snappy Tom is there in the intermittent archive, and he's really just Dame Groan-lite. Why accept the sardine John West rejects when you can have canned Groan tuna?

Besides, he's running the bog standard reptile line that we'll all be rooned by Xmas (and maybe the way mad King Donald is going with tariffs and the war on Iran we might be, but the reptiles never seem to mention that).

Spoiler alert, this is the end of snappy Tom's piece as he cranks himself up to an hysterical 11, with the pond offering it as a kind of teaser trailer ...

...Former Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe this week declared wholesale policy changes were required to revive investment. “Our living standards have stagnated,” he said at a public event to announce new governance rules for securities trading.
Lowe noted there had been no net growth in per capita incomes for seven or eight years. In the previous three decades, or so, per capita income was rising at 1.5 per cent, year in, year out. “This is the fundamental economic problem the country faces,” he said.
In simple terms, while our population had grown, before and after the Covid crisis, our capital stock of factories, machines, tools and computers had not kept pace. “We require businesses to invest,” Lowe said. “We need Australia to be a great place for businesses to invest, expand and hire people. It requires some more fundamental public policy reform.”
Lowe’s prescription sounded a lot like his frequent urgings during his seven years as head of the central bank, a term that ended three years ago. That sage advice was heeded by neither Coalition nor Labor governments.
One intervention by a former RBA board member could be seen as a niggling outlier; two, for a pundit, is a megatrend. Bill Kelty, one-time ACTU secretary, was the third amigo in Labor’s 1980s and 90s Accord-led economic revival with leaders Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. The trio’s political and intellectual thrust could launch a SpaceX Starship.
In a submission to a Senate inquiry examining legislation on the nation’s cash distribution arrangements, Kelty put in everyday terms what the OECD’s latest figuring on living standards meant for workers: two years lost income over a working life of 40 years.
“This is material to working people who are really battlers,” Kelty wrote to the Senate economics committee in his role as a non-executive director of Armaguard, the cash logistics company.
Yet commodity export prices are high and sales volumes have increased, he added.
“We know the underlying malaise,” Kelty wrote. “Productivity change is the third lowest in the OECD. Investment is low. Growth per capita is non-existent.”
But Kelty wasn’t done. “Government expenditure is rising much faster than inflation,” he continued. “The tax on working people is increasing faster than their wages. It is easy to blame the governments of the past and present, but ultimately we are all to blame. Something is wrong with this place and we need to do something about it.”
You feel it in your bones. It is this accursed inflation. Most costs are never coming down. Wages, stuck. And the rising debt’s call on taxpayers. How much longer it takes for younger Australians to get a start. We all live the frustration: our economy operates in fits and starts, like the way Messi meanders, sprints, and is ambling again after he’s called off-side.

Messi's the metaphor?

Try mad King Donald ...

The pond also thought about the Angelic one, but the pond didn't feel the need to swing a hammer at the skull of a dead woman, so decided to do it in caps ...

There you go, there's the reason the pond couldn't be bothered... too much tyke empathy:

At worst she was regarded as a bigot – and a Catholic bigot at that – who opposed gay marriage, abortion and unchecked immigration, a symbol of the modern twin sins of racism and homophobia. 

Yes, she was a bigot and a furrinerphobe and homophobe of the worst kind, and that's all that can be said about her, except that she also indulged in the worst forms of showbix exhibitionism, as old bigots are wont to do ...

So much Catholic empathy, just like a Spielberg movie.

So the pond carried on with the caps ...

Save donkeys in the holy land (no caps please, it ain't blessed), and never mind the human casualities?

At least Simpson knew what to do with his donkey.

And this last cap has a line worth repeating ...

Here's the guff the pond found particularly irksome ...

Widdecombe was unlike most politicians, a person whose beliefs really did motivate her action. I have long been an admirer of that extraordinary woman. She first came to my attention through two things. First, her tireless campaign to end mass abortion in Britain, especially when she sponsored legislation to try to lower the gestational age of abortion. Her arguments were always grounded in the starkly rational: “Why use all of medical technology to save one baby born at 24 weeks when another can be put into a bag and thrown away?” Should women be able to do with their bodies as they wish? Her rational reply: “There are two bodies here.”

That's rational? Old biddies telling other women what they can do with their bodies?

So much Catholic empathy. 

So we should leave all that to the Catholic priests who theoretically shouldn't be in the business of f*cking at all? (Sssh, no mention of the gay priest in the pond's extended family).

This doing of screen caps became infectious and so the pond decided to bulk up further with the lizard Oz editorialist.

Correspondents might remember that yesterday the pond warned Ahmed that once he appeared in the lizard Oz, he'd be treated as a useful fool, or as a useless tool, a means whereby they could perpetuate their current jihad in support of ethnic cleansing.

For those who missed the reference ...

‘I grew up in Gaza. Hamas betrayed us for its own ends’
Western apologists glorify Hamas as legitimate resistance, but the group serves its own ends – not my people.
By Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

And now let's see how Ahmed plays into the reptiles' Australian Daily Zionist News jihad ...

Sure as sh*t Sherlock, it's tolling for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank right now.

So much empathy, it's almost hard to take.

But wait there's more ...a standard serve of "big government" bashing, a reminder that at heart the reptiles are fully Hansonite ...

Gina's pampered pet is really living rent free in the lizard Oz hive mind, with the reptiles having profound empathy for the policies she borrowed from them.

And what a classic bit of clowning about conspiracy theories, what with the reptiles being the home for climate science conspiracy theories these past few decades.

And then came this weirdness ...

Hang on, did the lizard Oz editorialist just say going nuke didn't offer any cost benefits?

But, billy goat butt, SMRs require enriched uranium, specifically a higher concentration of the U-235 isotope than traditional large nuclear plants. (see here for more). The pond checked that out when ordering one for its backyard (soon to arrive, just like the Trump phone).

And thanks to the Bjørn-again one - scribbling in the lizard Oz Hidden costs of ‘cheap’ solar and wind are too high - we all know that nukes are the way of the future.

If we want to fix climate change, we instead must invest a lot more in low carbon dioxide energy research and development. Only a significant boost in R&D can bring about the technological breakthroughs that are needed – in reducing trash, in improving battery storage and efficiency, but also in other technologies such as modular nuclear – that will make low-carbon dioxide energy sources truly cheaper than fossil fuels.

Sure, mad King Donald immediately nuked the deal by demanding Saudi Arabia kowtow to Benji, like a property developer thinking he might slide a second attic past the council. That's his empathy at work.

And sure, the United States actively negotiated with the Shah to help Iran to move towards nukes, thereby contributing to the current situation ...

...Seeking a huge electrical power generating capability, Shah Mohammad Rez Pahlavi negotiated nuclear reactor deals with France and West Germany and wanted to buy eight  reactors from the United States.  This nuclear power initiative overlapped with Washington's growing concern over nuclear proliferation triggered by India's "peaceful nuclear explosion" in May 1974.  While the Shah had publicly disavowed a nuclear weapons capability, the Iranians declared that they had the "right" to a full nuclear fuel cycle, including reprocessing of spent fuel.  Not sure about the Shah's ultimate purposes, neither the Ford nor the Carter administrations would sell reactors without strings attacked.
Washington policymakers tried to use the nuclear negotiations as leverage to minimize the extent to which Iran could develop any of the critical elements of a nuclear weapons capability. The Carter administration would go further than its predecessor in attempting to reduce Iran's freedom of action, but both Presidents insisted on the tightest controls possible over Iran's ability to use U.S.-supplied nuclear technology and fuel for producing plutonium.  While the Iranians made nationalist arguments asserting their "rights" to reprocessing and other activities under the NPT, by the summer of 1978, the two sides had reached an agreement, which the Iranian revolution effectively nullified.
Interestingly, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who presided over the negotiations during 1974-1976, has downplayed the role of proliferation during the nuclear negotiations with Iran. In a 2005 Washington Post interview, he said that "I don't think the issue of proliferation came up"; "They were an allied country, and this was a commercial transaction. We didn't address the question of them one day moving toward nuclear weapons."...  Certainly no one saw an Iranian nuclear weapons capability as a likely near-term possibility, but Kissinger and the State Department never treated the agreement as simply a "commercial" proposition.  First, Ford administration officials wondered whether the Shah of Iran would move toward a nuclear weapons option, should the regional balance of power change.  Second, Kissinger and his senior advisers would only sign off an agreement that constrained Iran's capability to use U.S.-supplied resources for producing nuclear weapons material.  This was no less true of the Carter administration; both Ford and Carter wanted to ensure that the terms of the agreement met U.S. nuclear nonproliferation goals. (Here)

But hasn't all that worked out tremendously well?

Talk about knock down glory and empathy, just like Humpty Dumpty.

And so to a few 'toons...

Always with the Odyssey, and so the Muskian circle is complete ...

And a few AV distractions ...

Good old PBS, funds cut, but still carrying on away, with pale blue double breasters the next best thing to cardigans, and sure to rouse Polonius's ire ...

And the usual, with a twist ...