If His Lordship Alexander Downer and Major Mitchell bore you silly, there's always Noah's Ark ...

 

If anyone a few years ago had suggested the pond would open by quoting Bill Kristol quoting Eco, the pond would politely but firmly have suggested a psychiatric examination, yet here we are ...Not To Alarm You, But Trump’s Brain Is Melted And Hegseth’s neo-fascism is out in the open.

...I want to call on the novelist and critic, Umberto Eco, who provided one of the most helpful guides to this kind of politics in his great 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism.” (*intermittent archive link)
Eco provides a list of certain key elements or features of Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. A couple of these are particularly relevant to the emanations of our secretary of defense: Irrationalism, and machismo.
Here’s Eco on irrationalism:

'Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism. . . . Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.”'

And it’s no accident, Eco further points out, that “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
And side-by-side with Hegseth’s embrace of irrationalism is his exaltation of machismo.
As Eco explains,

"Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise."

Eco makes clear that his essay was not intended as merely a historical or diagnostic enterprise. Eco wrote in order to warn that fascism is not a thing of the past. Fascism is a permanent human temptation. It speaks to certain human passions and exploits certain human weaknesses that are always there to potentially be activated.

Why open this way? What's Pete Kegsbreath, and the rest of mad King Donald's craven minions got to do with herpetology studies?

For some reason, not so ineluctable, the pond was reminded of the reptiles of the lizard Oz ...

And so to Lord Downer ...

The header: By Alexander Downer
Slick political machines are driving us nowhere

The promise of a bot voice: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption: Anthony Albanese and Victorian Premier Ben Carroll in West Footscray. Picture: NewsWire / Ian Currie

The pitiful plea for attention: Make us preferred on Google

Of all the fatuous topics by the most fatuous of politicians, why did Lord Downer decide to blather about "slick political machines"?

Is he just some innocent rustic from deep in the Adelaide hills? Or is he a comely slick dresser with no time for machines?

Whatever, one thing is sure. Lord Downer won't be taking the opportunity for some self-reflection and copious apologies for his past life as a failed politician ... Why the Iraq war was right (sssh, don't mention WMDs)...

Do begin, please do ...

Over the past two decades, politics has become more professional, but the same cannot be said of government. Politicians and their minders have become extraordinarily sophisticated at winning elections and rather less accomplished at doing anything worthwhile once they have won.

Political parties can identify swinging voters, discover their anxieties and deliver carefully tailored messages to their phones. They can test a slogan before breakfast and discard an unpopular policy before lunch. The machinery of persuasion has never been more impressive. But to what purpose?
Increasingly, the purpose is simply to acquire power and retain it. Improving the country is something to be considered afterwards, provided the focus groups approve. I doubt there is any retreat from these techniques; no party will abandon technology that might help it win.
But we should recognise what happens when research ceases to inform judgment and starts to replace it. We get government by perpetual opinion poll. We get populism. By populism, I mean the habit of telling people what they want to hear rather than explaining what they need to understand. Conviction becomes a liability. Difficult reform becomes an electoral risk. Leadership gives way to the endless recitation of reassuring platitudes.
Consider the politician who announces a listening tour. Really? With all that polling, research and social media monitoring, are we supposed to believe the party has no idea what people think? The listening tour is just a stunt. Perhaps the more useful expedition would be an explaining tour.
None of this is an argument against listening. It is an argument for exercising judgment afterwards. The public have jobs, families, mortgages and lives to lead. They cannot spend every evening studying budget papers or assessing infrastructure proposals. Representative government exists precisely because we elect people to undertake that work on our behalf. Their responsibility is to make sound decisions, explain difficult choices and sometimes resist popular demands. Otherwise, we might as well replace cabinet with a market research company.

Really? At this point the reptiles decided they'd provide the needed focus ...Workers on the tracks at the Tottenham Rail Yards after Anthony Albanese and Premier Ben Carroll announced the Airport Rail Link project. Picture: NewsWire / Jason South

That's it? There are much better examples whereof His Lordship speaks ...

At this point His Lordship veered off into croweater matters, as if what happens in Adelaide - oh Adelaide - is of earth-shattering relevance ...

Instead, voters are encouraged to believe that governments can provide ever more benefits, tax somebody else and borrow the difference indefinitely. The bill is always somebody else’s problem, preferably after the next election.
Infrastructure offers a particularly revealing example. Everybody likes a new road, a railway or a bypass. Politicians like them especially. There are announcements, photographs in fluorescent jackets and, eventually, ribbons to cut. The benefits are visible. The costs are more conveniently dispersed.
Take Adelaide’s South Road. The Torrens-to-Darlington project carries a price tag of $15.4bn. That is an enormous commitment. Now consider how such spending is presented. A state government can announce an operating surplus while borrowing heavily to build infrastructure. The construction cost is recorded as an asset, with depreciation charged over its useful life, rather than being treated immediately as an operating expense. That is conventional accounting. The political sleight of hand comes when an operating surplus is presented as proof that the government is living within its means, without comparable emphasis on its cash requirements and rising debt.
Nor should we confuse state operating balances with the commonwealth’s cash balance. Federal infrastructure grants generally affect its deficit when paid. The distinctions matter. But none of these accounting treatments makes the resources free. A road cannot pay the government’s interest bill merely because it appears on a balance sheet.

His Lordship desperately tried to extract a more universal juice from the parochialism:

The scale extends far beyond Adelaide. Infrastructure Australia’s 2025 assessment identified $242bn in major public infrastructure projects over five years. That is a pipeline, not an annual spending figure, but it illustrates the magnitude of the commitments being made. Borrowing for productive infrastructure can be justified. A well-chosen project may reduce transport costs, improve productivity and generate benefits for decades. The question is whether those benefits justify the costs, and whether building it now represents the best use of scarce resources. Popularity cannot answer either question.
There is another cost that rarely appears in the announcement: what cannot be built because government has commandeered the people and materials. Engineers, electricians, concrete suppliers and construction machinery are not available in unlimited quantities. Public projects compete with private investment and, where their requirements overlap, with housing construction.
When governments accelerate enormous building programs in a constrained market, they drive up wages and material prices, delay other projects and make new homes more expensive. Announcing a housing target does not conjure another electrician into existence.

Might not examples be culled from the time when His Lordship strutted the roost? Why only that ranga? Pauline Hanson at the One Nation campaign in Melbourne. Picture: NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

She can't be blamed for recent cost rises, but there's no mention of who can be ...

There remained one final outburst from His Lordship, with a desperate attempt at economics, never his strongest suit ...

Of course, infrastructure spending is not the only cause of expensive housing. Planning restrictions, regulations, land availability and weak construction productivity matter too. Nor does every tunnelling worker become a house builder if a road project is postponed. But these qualifications do not abolish competition for resources. Governments should stop promising to build everything simultaneously and then claiming some war thousands of kilometres away is the cause of prices rising!
The Reserve Bank has highlighted renewed capacity pressures in construction. Politicians should take those constraints seriously before announcing the next grand scheme.
What is needed is a return to economic rationalism: rigorous assessment, realistic sequencing, transparent borrowing and the courage to defer projects that cannot justify their demands on the economy. The test of leadership is not whether a premier or prime minister can announce another project. It is whether they can explain why another worthy proposal must wait its turn for funding.
We also need leaders willing to explain that a project can be desirable without being affordable today. There is nothing heartless about setting priorities. The alternative is allowing inflation, higher taxes and debt servicing costs to chew up more of our resources. That’s what’s happening now.
Lionel Robbins famously placed scarcity and competing uses at the centre of economics. Politics does not suspend that reality. Winning an election does not increase the supply of skilled labour or repeal the cost of capital.
Australia needs politicians with convictions, including the conviction that prosperity must be earned through productivity and sensible choices. Let us make economic rationalism popular again.
Otherwise, the choices we refuse to make voluntarily may eventually be imposed by creditors and circumstances. That would be a miserable verdict on a political class so accomplished at winning power and so reluctant to use it responsibly.

As for the copious thumb career the reptiles provide for their contributors? This was the one accorded His Lordship. Alas and alack, here it is in full ... Alexander Downer Contributor

Have an immortal Rowe for making it this far, with Freedumb boy featuring ...

One of the revived joys of the pond's posting is that the intermittent archive has been restored,and so the pond can reference Mein Gott without going into him at great length.

Australian banks review their $2.58 trillion property exposure as falling values squeeze borrowers

All that's needed is a teaser trailer, and punters can decide if they think a visit to the cornfield is worthwhile ... 

The pond must confess that it was only the opening, uncredited, likely AI art, that stirred the pond ...

Ditto Simpleton Simon ... Albanese not our most unpopular PM ... yet

This is the sort of simplistic time waster and Albo basher that the pond might match by proposing that Simpleton Simon is not the most unpopular lizard Oz scribbler ... yet ...

The presence of the liar from the shire reminded the pond that it's better not to look back ...

That clearing of the decks allowed room for the pond to cope with Major Mitchell ...

Michael Shellenberger?

A reminder of a couple of his achievements, per his wiki (links and references at the original):

On April 3, 2024, Shellenberger published the "Twitter Files – Brazil", resulting in a formal Congressional inquiry, and two Congressional hearings, at which Shellenberger testified.Investigative journalists subsequently highlighted multiple errors in Shellenberger's reporting. In September 2024, Shellenberger appeared with Bill Nye at an event entitled "Can Science Save the World?" hosted by New College of Florida. The event "seeks to advance civil discourse and engagement through facilitating events that foster open discussion and debate on relevant public policy issues."
Shellenberger has faced accusations of "bad science" for his comments on climate change in Apocalpyse Never; he has also been criticized for arguing with prominent climate scientists on social media and "apologising" to the world on the behalf of environmentalists. A panel of scientists organized by Climate Feedback analyzed the claims he made in his "apology" article, concluding that they were "inaccurate or mislead readers by contradicting available evidence or using scientific data out of context."A Snopes article, which consulted multiple scientists that Shellenberger had cited, was similarly critical; Michael Mann called one of Shellenberger's central arguments "completely wrong," and found it was also contradicted by the very IEA source Shellenberger used to support it.

There's the Major again, always referencing the dubious, and while talking about payouts and corporate responsibility, must the pond go there again?

News Corp celebrates more than a decade of paying zero tax in Australia (possible paywall)

Despite its pretensions to lecture Australia about its values and how it should be run, the Murdoch family’s News Corp really has nothing to do with Australia. It is a foreign company, and it serially pays no tax here, despite earning billions in revenue on our shores.
In 2024-25, according to the Australian Tax Office’s corporate tax data released today, News Australia Holdings — the official name of News Corp’s Australian subsidiary — racked up 10 years of paying precisely zero tax. For that year, it earned $1.89 billion in revenue, made more than $300 million in profit (a record for the past decade) and paid nothing in tax.
Indeed, there’s a peculiar steadiness to News Corp’s tax dodging. For the past four years, it has earned around $1.8 billion in revenue and paid no tax on around $300 million in profits in 2023-24 and 2024-25, and $200 million in profits in 2021-22 and 2022-23.
You can go all the way back to when the first corporate tax transparency data was released for 2014-15 — the result of a Rudd-Gillard government initiative (opposed by the Coalition) — and find News Corp’s main company has paid no tax across those years, on revenue of, in total, $23.9 billion and profits of $1.38 billion.
The only News Corp entities to pay tax in that time were an investment company, which paid $200,000 (sic) in 2017-18 on $291 million in profits, and a pay TV financing arm, which paid $8 million in 2015-16. Real estate listing oligopolist REA Group, which News Corp part-owns, paid $246 million in tax.
Otherwise, News Corp’s only contributions to Australia are social division and the fostering of hate and resentment.

To be fair, exceptionally keen Keane, they also like to foster panic, fear, and alarm on a daily basis ...and quote loons who like to put in a good word for Vlad the sociopathic invader ...

Here we go again. The pond is constantly irritated by the way that the reptiles plead for Google attention, and then resolutely refuse to stray outside the paywalled hive mind by providing a link.

If you want that link the pond is happy to oblige. If reading the both siderist NY Times is your thing, here you go ...

Humanity Has Avoided Apocalypse Before. Let’s Do It Again. (*intermittent archive link)

Heck, the pond will even throw in a teaser trailer. Could it be any worse than spending time with the Major?

Sigh, back to the Major ... (remembering that it was the feeble efforts of the NY Times and their like that helped produce mad King Donald's age of lead)

What, no link again? Must the pond do all the work?

Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.
In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models — and make the case that Claude could be conscious.

That was saved to the intermittent archive under a different header:

Is Claude Conscious? Inside Anthropic’s Spiritual Quest

The pond doesn't give a toss what religious leaders think. 

The pond's idea of fun is being off with loons determined to raise shekels by proposing they're about to discover Noah's Ark ...a riff that has sent Faux Noise and other Murdochians into a speculative frenzy ... and recorded with a simpering, credulous stupidity ...

At this point the pond realised it had managed to filibuster its way through the Major's piece ...

Is there an irony there, that eternal bagging of the full to overflowing intertubes, what with the reptiles now pleading in each column for Google relevance, and the pond being digital, and so too the lizard Oz, save for the very few luddites that still read the tree killer edition?

But why has productivity fallen? Surely at least one reason is that punters must waste time checking on the Major's sources, when having a cup of tea and a biscuit might be more productive.

Credit where no credit is due ...

And now to that better version of the infallible Pope's weekend cartoon, promised by the pond...

And for a bonus, a reminder of what the mendacious Minns mob has produced ...

Speaking of Noah's Ark, Dan McClellan has been having a field day with mind-numbing details ...