Our Henry, the Lynch Mob and Killer Creighton, and lots of links ... are you not Friday entertained?

 

How could the pond resist starting with the venerable Meade's pitch for "getting Murdoched"?

‘This is the dark art’: new book claims pattern of personal attacks by Murdoch media empire
In a book dedicated to ‘the bullied’, two former News Corp journalists outline a behaviour pattern they call ‘getting Murdoched’, which they say harms individuals and public debate

Inter alia ...

...“Murdoched”, a term Dodd and Ricketson coin for the book, means to be “editorially attacked when one’s ideas or deeds do not accord with the media proprietor’s programs or publications”.
The book examines “murdoching” across the US, the UK and Australia, including dozens of interviews with prominent people and ordinary citizens about the way they were treated in newspapers, such as the Sun and the New York Post, and cable television network Fox News.
Dedicated to “the bullied”, the book focuses squarely on Murdoch’s “way of doing journalism”, Dodd and Ricketson write. The techniques include unleashing a torrent of articles against particular targets “contesting even the tiniest of points, so as to wipe the critic’s original ideas from everyone’s mind”. Another is to attack the critic personally, “pitilessly and repeatedly”. When all else fails, “murdoching” is “simply continuing to assert something as true as if no one has ever shown it was false”, they write.
“Murdoch perverted the fourth estate function of journalism,” Dodd and Ricketson write. “Instead of it being a way to hold power to account, Murdoch saw it as a means of holding individuals to account, especially those who held views contrary to his own.”
The consequences, they argue, are severe: these tactics have a chilling effect on democracy and seriously harm those who are targeted. And across the US, the UK and Australia, the three markets where Murdoch’s outlets are dominant, they write, the techniques employed by the company’s journalists are similar.

Well yes, over the years of closely observing the reptiles at work in the lizard Oz, the pond has lost count of the endless amounts of invective and abuse directed at hapless victims, not to mention ideas or observations that don't accord with hive mind expectations.

Getting Murdoched is as good a term as any for these relentless jihads.

Put it another way, as the infallible Pope did ...

Well it's Foxy in a way ...

So who or what is getting Murdoched today?

Almost by way of caricature, an ancient jihad, dedicated to relentless assaults on Juliar - is there a chaff bag handy? - resurfaced today thanks to Dame Slap ...

First there was the set up, by way of an EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘It was a different time’: Gillard remark ignites push on gender law
A women’s sex-based rights campaigner says ‘history will judge’ Anthony Albanese following Julia Gillard’s claims her 2013 gender reforms were not designed for the world they now govern.
By Rachel Baxendale, Jacquelin Magnay and Elizabeth Pike

Just below came Dame Slap, eager to keep the jihad flowing ...

Commentary by Janet Albrechtsen
The buck stops with our first female and feminist PM
I have always admired Julia Gillard’s life after politics. But alas, she deserves no credit for her public attempts to wheedle her way out of what her government did to Australian women in 2012.

Juliar and the chance to excoriate TG folk all in one bilious, indigestible assault!

Luckily the pond had other fish to fry this day and so could step around that particular jihad, by spending quality time with Our Henry ...

The header: A nation born to ‘save the world’ fights to save itself; The Declaration of Independence fuelled the aspiration to commit great deeds and ensured an immense gap between ambition and achievement.

The caption for the painting, perfect for the reptiles because it comes cheap from the archives: Declaration of Independence, painting by John Trumbull. Picture: Universal History Archive

The hole in bucket man decided he'd spend a bigly five minutes brooding about the state of the disunited states.

Would he mention Emeritus Chairman Rupert's role in degrading discourse to a point of insensibility, by way of Faux Noise? Would he note that mad King Donald is the final, perfect flowering of that degradation?

Of course not, Our Henry will stay resolutely shtum about all that, and wander back into the sheltering past in his usual way, though this day without the comfort of Thucydides ...

As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the meaning they place on that founding document bears little relation to its meaning in 1776. That has been its fate since its earliest years – and it is precisely that capacity for reinterpretation that has enabled it to remain both relevant and revered.
The recasting of a document that answered the needs of one era to address those of another is hardly unusual. Magna Carta, which entrenched the privileges of the barons, was reimagined in the 16th and 17th centuries as the pillar of the liberties of freeborn Englishmen. So it has been, too, with the Declaration’s most famous proposition: the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal”.
Understanding that proposition requires a grasp of what made the Declaration truly revolutionary. There had been previous declarations of independence: the Declaration of Arbroath (1320), which asserted the freedom of the Scots nation, is one example among many. But the American Declaration broke new ground.
Whereas its predecessors had claimed independence on the basis of historical continuity, the American Declaration proclaimed its aim “to dissolve the political bands” that had connected “one people with another”, thereby bringing into existence an entirely new political community. Moreover, it rested that claim not on an imagined past but on “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”– that is, on natural rights.

And what of the white Xian nationalism currently rampant, and wanting to turn the nation literal creationist? Not to worry, pause for another cheap image from the archive, featuring dudes in their period glory, much like Our Henry, Drafting of the Declaration of Independence by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.

The pond much prefers the conversation and insights offered by the two "the rest is history" dudes that came as an AV distraction at the end of yesterday's post, but that's yesterday, and now we're stuck here...

And finally, it announced that the new community was entitled to “assume among the powers of the earth” a “separate and equal station”, possessing, as a “Free and Independent State”, the “full Power to do all (the) Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do”.
Far from being central, the “self-evident” truth was instrumental to the Declaration’s main purpose. Deployed primarily to rebut the contention that the increasingly assertive colonial elites did not merit the same level of parliamentary representation as their British counterparts, it underpinned the colonists’ entitlement to control a polity of their own. It was therefore as the first act of collective self-determination, in which a nation willed itself into being and proclaimed its equality with states founded on centuries of dynastic succession, that the Declaration acquired immense historical significance.
Little wonder then that when Britain recognised the new polity at the end of the war in 1783, Edmond Burke remarked, with considerable astonishment, that “A great revolution has happened – a revolution made, not by chopping and changing of power in any one of the existing states, but by the appearance of a new state, of a new species, in a new part of the globe”. This was, he concluded, as momentous “as the appearance of a new planet would (be) in the system of the solar world”.
However, another feature of the Declaration’s intellectual context ensured that the “self-evident” truth did not remain confined to the sovereign equality of peoples, becoming instead what Martin Luther King referred to as the revolution’s great “promissory note” to generations of Americans.
For the new nation was by no means ordinary. Its birth, John Adams wrote in his diary, was “the opening of a grand design in Providence for the emancipation of mankind”. America was more than a state; it was a redeemer. The “infinite privilege” of the United States, Woodrow Wilson later claimed, was that of “saving the world”.

If you encourage this rampant form of exceptionalism, get ready to beat a path to mad Kind Donald, as the reptiles again resorted to an easy and cheap visual distraction... Leaders of March on Washington for Jobs & (sic) Freedom marching from right to left Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Eugene Carson Blake, Martin Luther King, Floyd McKissick, Matthew Ahmann and John Lewis in a scene from the TV documentary The Sixties. Picture: Robert W Kelley / Time Life Pictures

Our Henry eventually gets around to noting that maybe all is not well in the American dream, but safely insulates himself from the current awkward reality...

That sense of divine mission proved a two-edged sword. It inspired extraordinary confidence in the nation’s capacity for moral purpose. It was in the character of Americans, said Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address, to “believe in ourselves and in our capacity to perform great deeds”.
And among the greatest of those deeds was the commitment, first clearly articulated by Abraham Lincoln, “to afford” every American “an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life”: that is, to realise in practice the “self-evident” equality announced at the republic’s birth.
Yet the vaulting ambition also imposed a burden of expectation so enormous as to ensure perpetual disappointment – and gave that disappointment an uncompromising moralism that could readily shade into fanaticism.
Never was that tendency more evident than during the fiery religious revivals – the “Great Awakenings” – that periodically swept the nation. Convinced that “God had shed further light upon his revelation” as a sign of “the coming Kingdom of God on earth”, movements sprang up that hailed the moment as the cusp of salvation. But as the boundary between this world and the next seemed to dissolve, so the power of Satan – and of his desperate attempts to thwart the divine plan – became ever more immediate.
With so much at stake, opposition was no longer a political disagreement to be accommodated or overcome; it was a demonic force, acting to undermine the millennial nation from within, that had to be decisively defeated.
The capacity of these movements to fracture the republic was all the greater because they drew together two powerful currents in American Protestantism whose influence long outlasted Protestantism’s cultural predominance: an Arminian conviction that individuals and societies alike could choose salvation, and an antinomian tendency to regard those acting under divine inspiration as released from ordinary moral and institutional restraints.
Whenever the social fabric weakened, the combination of those currents with the conviction that an evil conspiracy had gained control of the republic transformed political contention into moral warfare, driving the nation ever deeper into civil discord.

Instead of offering a snap of mad King Donald, the reptiles sought refuge in a safe archival 
harbour, Abraham Lincoln.

And Our Henry stayed stuck in the past, keen to offer little beyond bland generalities and ancient authors ...

The danger was not lost on contemporary observers. Having travelled through the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded that, while there were many fragilities, the republic’s survival depended less on its commendable constitutional arrangements than on “the habits of heart and mind” of its citizens – habits that leaned towards civility and restraint.
But those habits were precisely what the new moral politics threatened to dissolve. As rhetorical and physical violence mounted in the lead-up to the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln warned that the fading memory of the sacrifices on which the republic had been founded, together with the erosion of faith in its ideals, was removing the bulwarks that held it together.
With what he termed the “mobocratic spirit” – which recognised no limits to political conflict – on the rise, and the excesses of “the lawless in spirit” acquiring an alarming degree of legitimacy, “depend on it, this government cannot last”.
The redemptive fervour that had helped inspire the republic was now turning against it, transforming partisan rivalry into a fratricidal struggle. Unless a “political religion”, devoted to reverence for law and the orderly functioning of civil institutions, could once again bind Americans, Lincoln prophesied, the warring factions would not merely render those institutions ineffective; they would ensure their “total annihilation”.
Has Lincoln’s premonition ever rung truer? And are the dangers of the politics of raging self-righteousness not as great for us as they are for the United States? The enduring glory of the Declaration was that it gave the highest political expression to the Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress and ordered liberty. The question, on its 250th anniversary, is no longer whether those ideals can found free societies; it is whether they retain the moral force to preserve them.

Oh come on, just mention Faux Noise and its acme achievement, to which it remains American Fair devoted (and how many turned up to that state fair? Why squillions if you watched Faux Noise)...

And with that done, the pond's cup overflowed, because the Lynch mob was also out and about this day ... determined as always to defame and sully the reputation of the University of Melbourne:

The header: We need more in the academy to speak up against ideological bullying; When disagreement takes the form of co-ordinated ideological pressure aimed at shaming an individual into refusing a scholarly honour, it crosses a line.

The caption for a fuss in the ranks: Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine demonstrators at the University of Melbourne. Picture: Jason Edwards

This will be another familiar jihad for students of the lizard Oz's hive mind: a passionate plea for the right for the current government of Israel to continue with its ethnic cleansing and genocide, without let, hindrance or protest:

It is ironic that at a moment when we celebrate the most important open letter in the history of the world – the Declaration of Independence – a slither of Australia’s university class writes its own, demonising a democracy.
How Western civilisation has declined. And how much the signatories of this Israelophobic letter would love that to be true. There is no sacred honour being pledged here. Instead, Associate Professor Matthew Champion must give up a prize, worth $US300,000 ($434,000), because 150 (or so) “academics, writers, activists, and students” claim it “normalises the colonial occupation of Palestine, and Israel’s apartheid regime” to accept it.
“We the undersigned believe that acceptance of the award, in the context of ongoing Israeli genocide, war crimes, human rights abuses … is unconscionable”. All this because the prize giver, the Dan David Foundation, is insufficiently onside with this anti-Israel position of the activists. It is, of course, merely coincidental that the prize giver is Jewish.
Their text is bog-standard identity politics: define Israel as a “white settler” project, ignore Palestinian agency, treat Hamas voters in Gaza as a uniquely oppressed group (which they are not), and then chide any behaviour Israel takes in its own defence – and indeed anyone seen as complicit in that self-defence.
The clear implication is that Champion will be added to that list unless he turns down his prize – for work, get this, on medieval concepts of time.
Despite the ability of anti-Zionists to make campus life hard for their Jewish colleagues and students, I do not seek their silencing. I do not demand they repay their ARC grants – funded by an Australian government allied to the Zionist entity.
If we cancelled every professor that believes a crazy idea, the higher education sector would be in trouble. Better they find expression (and challenge) at a university than spilling over into the general population, though they do that too.
We are wrong to inflate the significance of this latest intercession. Note that the petitioners are a minority within a minority. Unless more coverage unlocks even more signatures, we are dealing with less than 0.01 per cent of university staff in Australia. My conversations with some of the other 99.99 per cent reveal colleagues delighted (read: very jealous) that Champion has won the historians’ jackpot.
Tiny factions can, of course, become powerful. Didn’t the Christians and the Bolsheviks start small?

The Lynch mob is of course faithfully following in the footsteps of the lizard Oz's jihad.

In the past days, there's been this ...

Top scholars leap to defence of University of Melbourne historian in academic ‘double standards’ row
High-profile scholars have accused more than 100 academics of double standards over demands that historian Matthew Champion return his Dan David Prize.

And this ...

Melbourne academic Matthew Champion rejects boycotters’ demands to return $435,000 history prize
Matthew Champion vows to keep the $435,000 Dan David Prize despite a campaign by more than 100 academics, including Randa Abdel-Fattah.

Ah that name, redolent of another reptile jihad.

The reptiles love soft Israeli power and are no doubt hoping to collect a prize for "best jihadists for ethnic cleansing" in the next year or so.

Meanwhile, the reptiles slipped in a snap ... Interim vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne Professor Glyn Davis. Picture: Aaron Francis / The Australian

The Lynch mob carried on exuding smug complacency, as is his wont ...

But I reckon those represented here are not the vanguard of a new revolutionary movement. They carry along too few comrades. I think even students are starting to twig that the jig is up. Stan Grant said, “identity is a cage in search of a bird”. After a three-year degree, some students are desperate to escape the group identities activist academics have put them in.
The signatories are thus neither a representative sample of Australian academics nor even of humanities and social science (HASS) scholars, where anti-Israel sentiment runs higher than in other disciplines. There is a special tragedy in that, which I will leave for another day.
Remember also that universities have a dual role: as asylums and as interfaces. We enable the brilliant work of researchers to inform and improve society. But we also have high walls that protect society from our activist obsessions. This open letter has not managed to clamber over that wall.
I’d be confident that everyone who has signed it considers himself an “antiracist” and likely a champion of that modish cause. We are then in the bizarre situation of having an official campus culture dedicated to antiracism seemingly unable to staunch the outbreak of one of the most ancient of hatreds: antisemitism.
My own university, to its credit, has congratulated Champion for his success and encouraged him to accept the prize. That sort of institutional resistance to ideological bullying matters. We need to see more of it in higher education.
This does, though, mask a deeper problem. This fixation with concepts of race, mostly imported from the American campus, has created a sea in which antisemites swim.
What if antiracism turns out to be an essential precursor of antisemitism? Its simple binaries lend themselves to the oppressor-versus-oppressed narrative that so distorts our understanding of Israel’s predicament.
The letter derides Israel as an apartheid state; the end of white rule in South Africa remains an enduring model for antiracists. But if Israel is an apartheid regime, it must have no right to exist. This open letter pretends to want one man to give up his history prize; its actual goal is the eradication of a nation.
The letter targets the Israeli government, Israeli state institutions, Israeli universities, the Dan David Foundation, and Zionism as a political project. Would a letter, demanding justice for the Uighurs, that targeted the Chinese government, Chinese state institutions, Chinese universities, and Chinese communism as a political project escape the accusation of Sinophobia? Wouldn’t such a campaign against Beijing inevitably invite racists to join it?
Champion is right to accept his prize. His colleagues are entitled to disagree and to challenge that decision. But when disagreement takes the form of co-ordinated ideological pressure aimed at shaming an individual into refusing a scholarly honour, it crosses an important line.
The far larger – and too often silent – majority of academics have a responsibility to speak up when public pressure campaigns like this become a form of ideological bullying.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Talking of ideological bullies, it takes one to know one, and once again, the University of Melbourne stands in the vanguard of ethnic cleansing as a natural, neigh inevitable way forward, the perfect resolution to the situation of Gaza and the West Bank ...

For further reading, see Haaretz's In His Own Words: Naftali Bennett Is Committed to Annexing the West Bank

And so on, and so much for alternatives to Benji, as the dissembling Lynch mob enthusiastically celebrates the cause ... joining that cosmic circus of clowns that helped Benji out with a war on Iran, and hasn't that turned out fine and dandy ...

Meanwhile, at the top of this day's early morning digital page, the reptiles were sparing a thought for Moira and carrying on their perennial jihad about taxes...

Just for the record, as the pond wouldn't want to tease without an intermittent archive link ...

EXCLUSIVE
Go harder on taxes: Labor’s wishlist for PM
NSW Labor pushes Anthony Albanese to go further on tax reforms
Following a controversial budget, NSW Labor’s grassroots branches now want a billionaires tax and an end to negative gearing grandfathering.
By Matthew Cranston

Urgent Hearing 
Deeming launches last ditch court bid to stop Libs dumping her
Moira Deeming is suing Victorian Liberal president Brian Loughnane on Friday to block her disendorsement, as Pauline Hanson declares One Nation doesn’t want the MP either.

By Rachel Baxendale and Lily McCaffrey

Seems she's put herself in some kind of headlock, and won't someone think of the squillionaires!

The pond must trip past all this to celebrate Killer Creighton's solution to climate change, and assorted recent, happening heat waves across Europe and the Unites States.

Just bung in A/C and watch it all fade away ...

The header: Why it’s time Europe embraced the magic of airconditioning; The unnecessary deaths triggered by the latest heatwave are a reminder of how arrogant climate change fanatics have become.

The caption for the collage, apparently put together without the help of human hands: Could Chris Bowen's big coup at COP be introducing heatwave-hit Europe to airconditioning? Pictures: News Corp / iStock

This was a peak Killer outing, epic climate science denialism, and all done in just three minutes ...

Energy Minister Chris Bowen is apparently pushing for a global electrification target of 35 per cent by 2035 – up from around 20 per cent – as part of his $150m Australian taxpayer-funded presidency of the COP31 summit, which will be hosted in Turkey later this year.
If only adapting to climate change was part of the brief, he could make a last-minute change by ditching electrification and replacing it with a more modest, achievable and far more helpful goal: 35 per cent airconditioning penetration in Europe by 2035.
The thousands of unnecessary deaths likely triggered by the latest heatwave in Europe are a reminder of how dangerous, unscientific and arrogant climate change fanatics have become, even as the rest of the world realises “net zero by 2050” is a costly fraud. Despite economic stagnation, European nations remain among the richest in the world and yet airconditioning penetration is not even 20 per cent, thanks to the elite’s hypocritical aversion to one of the greatest innovations of all time.
When the mercury hit high 30s in Brussels last week, the European Commission switched off the airconditioning on the first seven floors, where most of the building’s 3000 staff work, but exempted floors eight to 13, where Her Majesty Ursula von der Leyen, the EC’s president, and her staff were no doubt mulling new ways to save the planet. Let them stay cool!

Maestro, a snap of the villainess, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen talks to journalists during a media conference at the EU summit in Brussels. Picture: Geert Vanden Wijngaert / AP Photo

As is always the case with Killer, nihilism is at the core of the argument. Let the world fry, so long as you've got A/C:

Cutting back on airconditioning for others in Europe is more about virtue-signalling than reducing emissions. About half of Belgium’s electricity – and around three-quarters of France’s – is generated by nuclear energy, for instance, which produces zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Even American’s supposedly gauche predilection for airconditioning is a rounding error on the global emissions pie chart. Airconditioning globally contributes around 3 per cent of global emissions and the US share isn’t more than a third of that – in other words negligible.
But following the logic of Europe’s climate change zealots can be challenging. Warming the planet is bad, but not the home. Global carbon dioxide emissions from heating are at least four times greater than those for cooling, according to Our World in Data. So, it’s OK to keep your food cool, but not yourself.
In 2024, according to Eurostat data, space cooling made up 0.8 per cent of European household’s energy usage, compared to 77 per cent for space and water heating.
“OMG, this is so rich!” wrote Paris deputy mayor Audrey Pulvar on social media in a comical attempt to hit back at Americans poking fun at Europe’s lack of airconditioning – something 90 per cent of American households have taken for granted for a long time.
“As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, you bear a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences,” she fumed earlier this week.
At least here we can observe some degree of understanding that the climate doesn’t care where greenhouse emissions come from. European countries can flaunt their greenhouse emissions statistics all they want, but the global total is still increasing every year as Europe – and Australia – offshore their manufacturing (and jobs) to the rest of the world.

There followed a rare acknowledgement by the reptiles that large parts of the world have been a tad warm of late, and with any luck we'll be joining them later in the year with a sooper dooper hot summer, A man sits out in the sun in a park in Leicester Square in central London. Picture: Brook Mitchell / AFP

Killer followed up with a final flourish of Killer logic ...

Indeed, if she were serious about pointing the finger over emissions, Pulvar should’ve directed her criticism elsewhere. China, which still insists it is a developing country, has almost 990 million airconditioning units installed, according to Our World in Data. That’s more than four times as many as Europe, resulting in a penetration ratio three times that of Europe.
Its greenhouse emissions footprint is about four times that of the US and growing. Chinese officials no doubt understand what should be obvious: airconditioning not only massively improves the wellbeing of ordinary people but also increases economic growth and productivity, and promotes better learning outcomes too.
If the Europeans were serious about reducing emissions, they would encourage take-up of airconditioning. The amount of carbon emitted for every dollar of economic output has been falling steadily across advanced economies for decades, as innovation makes energy cleaner and more productive. Indeed, airconditioners themselves are a good example of this: quieter, cheaper, cleaner and dramatically more efficient than those of a generation ago.
In drumming up support in Europe for his last-minute change to his COP31 target, Bowen could cite an insightful economic paper from 2013 entitled The Remarkable Decline in US Temperature Mortality Relationship over the 20th Century.
“Residential AC appears to be both the most promising technology to help poor countries mitigate the temperature-related mortality impacts of climate change and, because fossil fuels are the least expensive source of energy, a technology whose proliferation will speed up the rate of climate change,” the report concluded.
No doubt it will be hard for European leaders to read that fossil fuels were – and still are, measured correctly – the cheapest source of energy. But it will be much harder to face being lumped in with “poor countries”, which is almost certainly where they’ll end up if they maintain their mindless obsession with reducing emissions.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

What a delightful load of Killer Krap, a perfect summation of the IPA view of the world, citing a paper without providing a link, without pausing to contemplate what it might mean to attempt to air condition the entire world as a way of avoiding the consequences of climate change, and with the aid of fossil fuels no less!

In view of the cartoon to follow, the pond joyously quotes Google's AI on the implications of the paper ...

... in the context of climate denialism or skepticism, this paper is sometimes selectively cited by contrarians to argue that temperature-related mortality is no longer a threat, or to suggest that climate change is inherently benign because humans can easily adapt. Climate scientists and public health experts counter this argument by emphasizing several key points:

• The Cost of Adaptation: While air conditioning protects wealthier populations in developed countries, it is energy-intensive and highlights systemic inequalities. Poorer populations and developing nations often lack access to these technologies, leaving them acutely vulnerable.
• Energy Vulnerability: Increased air conditioning usage dramatically strains the electrical grid during peak heatwaves, which can lead to blackouts that exacerbate the very crisis they are meant to solve.
• Broader Climate Impacts: The paper's findings on heat adaptation do not negate the other severe impacts of climate change, such as extreme weather, agricultural disruptions, or rising sea levels.

Luckily Wilcox came up with an equally Killer idea, which Killer will probably embrace wholeheartedly ...

And here's a little backgrounder for a man who reports frequently on what's going down in Vlad the Sociopath's world ...