In which Lord Downer goes biblical, the Caterist goes Ming, and Major Mitchell goes full Pauline ...

The pond had hoped to be able to put aside friendly atheist Easter banter and get back to the main sociopathic extreme far right lizard Oz reptile business - ruining the fragile condition of the planet even more than it is at the moment.

After all, if you happen to read the whole bible - which to its eternal shame, the pond has done a couple of times - after you've got past the begats and the dystopian vision of the old testament, there's only so long you can try to ignore the socialistic, almost full commie, fully woke talk in Christ's new testament teachings (especially if you ignore misogynistic late comers like St Paul, and note that Christ was even prepared to give hookers a fair go, and had not a word to say about teh gaze).

But then Lord Downer had to come along on Easter feria secunda and ruin it all...

The header: Why we must resist the progressive push to abolish our core Australian traditions; An ABC announcer’s reluctance to mention Good Friday while discussing fish sales has highlighted progressive efforts to diminish Christian traditions in Australian society.

The caption for the flag-waving snap: A Royal Australian Navy MH-60R Seahawk flies the flag on Australia Day. The progressive left has taken aim at the national flag and many of our traditions.

The pond was tempted to send this nonsensical blather straight to the intermittent archive - his effort was there early in the Mōnandæg morning -  but it's been acting kinda funny lately, and how could the pond deprive others of the chance to plunge into a dose of white Xian nationalism, His Lordship style, especially as it's all the fault of the ABC:

Last Friday morning an ABC announcer told us there was a big upsurge in sales of fish at the new Sydney Fish Market. When she was speculating as to why, she thought it was because last Friday was a public holiday.
She couldn’t bring herself to remind us that Friday was Good Friday, a day of huge significance to the large number of Australians who are Christians. It is the tradition for Christians on Good Friday to eat fish. That an ABC announcer should avoid any reference to Good Friday should come as no surprise. The ABC, particularly in Sydney, is run by the progressive left.

Dear sweet long absent lord, are we all tykes now? 

Back in the day, the pond can remember proddie swine giving tykes a terribly hard time about eating fish on Friday:

It sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown thriller: A powerful medieval pope makes a secret pact to prop up the fishing industry that ultimately alters global economics. The result: Millions of Catholics around the world end up eating fish on Fridays as part of a religious observance.
This "realpolitik" explanation of why Catholics eat fish on Friday has circulated for so long, many people grew up believing it as fact. Some, myself included, even learned it in Catholic school. It's a humdinger of a tale — the kind conspiracy theorists can really sink their teeth into. But is it true?

The answer at NPR here had this annotation ...

...after Henry became smitten with Anne Boleyn, English fish-eating took a nosedive.
You see, Henry was desperate with desire for Anne — but Anne wanted a wedding ring. The problem was, Henry already had a wife, Catherine of Aragon, and the pope refused to annul that decades' long marriage. So Henry broke off from the Roman Catholic Church, declared himself the head of the Church of England and divorced Catherine so he could marry Anne.
Suddenly, eating fish became political. Fish was seen as a " 'popish flesh' that lost favour as fast as Anglicism took root," as Kate Colquhoun recounts in her book Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking.

Well yes, they were still carrying on that way about fish-eating in the tykes v proddy wars in Tamworth in the twentieth century, but do go on ...

Fishermen were hurting. So much so that when Henry's young son, Edward VI, took over in 1547, fast days were reinstated by law — "for worldly and civil policy, to spare flesh, and use fish, for the benefit of the commonwealth, where many be fishers, and use the trade of living."
In fact, fish fasting remained surprisingly influential in global economics well into the 20th century.
As one economic analysis noted, U.S. fish prices plummeted soon after Pope Paul VI loosened fasting rules in the 1960s. The Friday meat ban, by the way, still applies to the 40 days of the Lenten fast.
A few years before the Vatican relaxed the rules, Lou Groen, an enterprising McDonald's franchise owner in a largely Catholic part of Cincinnati, found himself struggling to sell burgers on Fridays. His solution? The Filet-O-Fish.
While not exactly the miracle of loaves and fishes, Groen's little battered sandwich has fed millions around the world.

So there's the answer. Food that passingly resembles fish, but tastes like cardboard.

A treatise on fish eating was the last place the pond had expected His Lordship to take his readers, and yet here we are.

The pond decided to let His Lordship have the rest of his say without any theological niceties intruding on the rant ...

Oh sheesh, not the whole bloody war on Xmas thingie again, in bloody April!

Let’s understand what members of the progressive left are trying to achieve. They want to deconstruct existing society and replace it with their conception of a utopian society. To achieve this quiet revolution they not only aim to direct control over the private lives of individuals but they want to destroy many of our traditions, be they public or private.
Some of the traditions they want to abolish are relatively minor and some are significant. Where once we happily sent cards in December wishing people a Merry Christmas, the progressive left just says “Happy Holidays”. Let’s abolish Christmas. In the progressive world, Christianity and Christian celebrations should be downgraded.
That applies to Easter as well. The Easter holidays are just an excuse to have two extra days off. The progressives wouldn’t want to mention why or the origins of these celebrations.
Progressives want to get rid of as many links as we have with Britain, despite the fact modern Australia has its roots in the UK. King’s Counsels are to become senior counsels. Judges should abandon their robes. The monarchy is to be abolished. The national flag should be changed or, if that’s too difficult, other symbolic flags should also be flown alongside it to reduce its status as a symbol of the nation. Australia Day should be replaced altogether. The list is a long one.
Interestingly, while progressives want to abolish most of the traditions of modern Australia, they nevertheless worship the traditions of other cultures. Our progressive Prime Minister acknowledged the beginning of Ramadan but totally ignored Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Indeed they don’t object to those non-European traditions being injected into our society as long as our more familiar traditions are abolished, such is the incoherence of the ideology of progressives. They are more defined by what they dislike rather than what they like.
This progressive agenda, which has increasingly gained traction in Australia, should be resisted. It needs to be resisted for two reasons. First, deconstructing existing society and trying to reconstruct it along the lines of some utopian model always fails. You don’t have to go back far in history to see that Robespierre’s France, Lenin’s plans for Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Hitler and Mussolini’s visions in Europe all ended in disaster. In every case they tried to build a model society, tearing down institutions and traditions to build something completely new in their place. To do that they had to compel people to abandon their way of life, and that involved brutal coercion.
Second, the societies that have thrived have been ones that have maintained strong traditions while embracing modernity and change to ensure society remains workable and prosperous. As circumstances and technology change, so too should institutions and traditions evolve.
Being open to modernity and evolution is common sense. Traditions are the important foundation for the durability and coherence of society.
In a world of constant and rapid change, traditions provide a sense of stability. Traditions anchor people. They connect the past, the present and the future so life doesn’t feel like a random sequence of events. Looked at another way, in a world where modernisation is inevitable and technological change is largely welcome, traditions provide continuity and grounding for society.
Traditions are more than that. They are also about identity. They tell you what group you belong to, whether that’s a family, a nation, or a culture. Without them, a country is just a group of taxpayers who happen to share physical space.

As befits a spray of white Xian nationalism (to hell with the Jews and the Islamics and the secularists), the reptiles featured a foreshadowing of later Anzac action as the sole remaining visual interruption... Abolishing Anzac Day would attack the heart of our national self-image. Picture: Evan Morgan

Perhaps Lord Downer is right, perhaps this tendency to modernity is ruining everything, perhaps people should look to traditional pursuits, which would place them in the mainstream of modern American 'looning ...

Oh you sly old devil, you eye-catching rogue ...

As for the rest, you've heard it a zillion times, and here it is for the zillionth and once time ...

Modern Australia has developed its own traditions across the past 238 years. We honour Anzac Day as the day when we remember those who have sacrificed for the nation. Abolishing Anzac Day would attack the heart of our national self-image.
Australia Day celebrates the founding of modern Australia. To abolish Australia Day is seen by many as a strike against our pride in our nation and its history.
We celebrate Christmas and Easter as Christian holidays because modern Australia was founded as a Christian society. In the last census 43 per cent of Australians identified as Christians, yet only 3.1 per cent identified as Muslims and fewer still as Hindus and Buddhists. While we respect traditions of other societies, we expect our traditions to be properly respected too and our traditions are steeped in history.
As a society we may not be as Christian as we once were – 39 per cent say they have no religion. But Christianity forms the foundation of our modern society; our morality, our human rights, our commitment to the equal value of all individuals regardless of their gender and ethnicity. In our society all these things are derived from Christian teaching.
Then there are the rites of passage: at birth there are everything from baptisms to baby showers. There are weddings and funerals. The format of these traditions has gradually changed. There are fewer weddings in churches and more at the beach. You’re likelier to hear a welcome to country than the Lord‘s Prayer at a wedding! But the institution of marriage has remained because it helps to provide continuity and certainty in relationships that may bring children into the world.
Members of the progressive left mock our traditions. They want to get rid of them. Some recognise politically that such changes will take a great deal of time but the ambition is there to get rid of our traditions. If they succeed they will hollow out our society and we will be nothing more than millions of individuals living on our vast island, disconnected from our past and disconnected from each other.

Ah, it's all the fault of those deviant uppity blacks, carrying on as if they were first in country.

Thank you Lord Downer ...

Before proceeding further, the pond should note a splendid new bit of visual cleverness in the reptile's "news" coverage.

A bifurcated, loosely animated set of rotating images! Look, AI magic, an AI marvel ...

Oh dear, not One Nation again, as Geoff chambered a round and Brownie was so desperate he turned to comrade Bill ... (what next, comrade Dan makes a comeback? Desperate times)

Sorry, the pond had to send them to the intermittent archive, because the Caterist was loose in a quarry and inspecting the flow of floodwaters again ...

The header: Political leaders trade clarity for data-driven clicks in digital era; In an interconnected world in which we rely on a global energy market, the idea we can stand apart is a comforting fiction.

The caption for that sneering man: The messaging of the Prime Minister made a persuasive case for nothing. Picture: Martin Ollman

At the moment, the pond would settle for nothing, with nobody a close second ... but go on, do the Ming the Merciless trick we love so well ...

In the era of TikTokification, political leaders seldom talk to people. They talk to the algorithm, the invisible hand of the digital communications market that rewards not what is true or important but what is likeliest to hold attention.
Anyone who expected Anthony Albanese’s address to the nation last week to be imbued with the gravity of, say, Robert Menzies’ 1939 declaration of war was bound to be disappointed.
Menzies’ radio broadcast was delivered live as an unskippable, unclippable speech, marshalling facts in logical sequence to make a persuasive case for war.
Albanese’s speech, by contrast, was a grab-bag of brief, search engine-optimised statements, making a persuasive case for nothing while failing to resolve competing propositions.
The Prime Minister’s insistence that Australia is “not a participant” in the conflict is not so much wrong as beside the point.
In an interconnected world in which we rely on a global energy market, the idea we can stand apart is a comforting fiction.

The reptiles made sure to note where the fault lay, and a grievous fault it was ... Anthony Albanese failed to spark the nation with his address. Picture: David Beach

That snap of the downcast man inspired the quarry cultist to new heights ...

More important, it avoids the more difficult question: where, in strategic and moral terms, does Australia stand?
Iran is not a distant or neutral actor. Its conduct, including hostile activity on Australian soil, is that of an enemy. A government with a clear strategic compass would recognise the war against Iran is in Australia’s interests. It would acknowledge without equivocation the longstanding basis of its support for Israel.
While the analog era rewarded clarity and conviction, the digital world encourages content banks of safe, repeatable and context-free fragments.
The trend towards data-driven, emotionally calibrated messaging, accelerated by artificial intelligence, helps explain why political language often feels formulaic, repetitive and risk-averse. At consequential moments such as this, that becomes a problem, particularly in the democratic world, where leaders require consent for sacrifice.
In his televised address at the start of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered one of the finest and most persuasive speeches of his presidency. The build-up of Soviet missiles had been secret, swift and extraordinary, he said. The US didn’t seek conflict but it had been taught a clear lesson in the 1930s: aggressive conduct, if left unchecked, ultimately leads to war.

Hmm, the pond is getting more than a faint whiff of war mongering, backed by this interrupting snap, and Xian messaging from a notorious flogger of Chinese-manufactured bibles ... US President Donald Trump delivers a message on Holy Week – ‘Happy Easter to all, may God bless you, may God bless the United States of America’. Picture: X/WhiteHouse

Some faint sense of reality about the mad King finally entered the flood-water divining Caterist picture ...

Contrast that with Donald Trump’s eight-minute video posted on Truth Social announcing the start of hostilities against Iran on February 28.
The underlying reason for action – to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons – was the same yet the tone was different. Trump promised “a massive and ongoing operation” against “a very wicked, radical dictatorship”. It would raze Iran’s missile industry to the ground, annihilate its navy.
Unlike JFK, Trump has failed to convince nonpartisan Americans to rally around the flag. In 1962, the administration’s action had broad support among Republicans and Democrats. In 2026, support for US action falls mainly along party political lines.
Almost alone among democratic leaders, Trump has embraced social media boldly and provocatively.
His predecessor, Joe Biden, took the more common path of cautious and repetitive framing, using words that would remain safe when clipped and were therefore insufferably bland. His platform-friendly statement to Americans that “we’re going to be OK … making progress … building back better” were easy to remember and even easier to forget.

Boldly and provocatively?

The pond is always impressed by the Caterist's way with words. Others might call it Batshyte Crazy ...

Trump Triggers 25th Amendment Calls With Unhinged Easter Meltdown (intermittent archive)

Oh dear, and then we'd get JD ... out of the battered fish frying pan into the battered fish griller.

But the pond gets the Caterist point.

Why not join this sundowning weirdo on a little excursion, a little journey, even if the Poms are a tad reluctant and yearning to overturn Brexit? British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has also taken a risk-averse approach. Picture: Getty Images

Talk about scaredy cats ...get down with the bold, brave Caterist, always up for risk-taking and bunging on a do ...

Britain’s Keir Starmer has taken the same safe path and is now widely considered to be in his death throes as Prime Minister: bloodless, managerial, risk-averse to the point of opacity.
Like Starmer, Albanese keeps his animating vision, if he has one, close to his chest. Last week’s National Press Club speech bore the hallmarks of modern industrial political communication: modular construction, repetition and emotional calibration. It cycles through the empathetic settings of concern (“I understand”), reassurance (“commonsense approach”) and communal obligation (“looking after people”, “working together”), hiding its moral vagueness under a blanket of emotional warmth.
Albanese’s lips were moving but what was he saying? Was it a war speech? A fuel crisis and national resilience speech? Was it a Future Made in Australia speech, a gambling reform speech or a budget preview? It was all of them and none of them at once. Its core weakness was its failure to answer the hard questions it raises.
Albanese says the degrading of Iran’s military capacity is “a good thing” but doesn’t explain why when Australia is not an active participant, as we have been in other major wars in which the US has engaged. He calls for de-escalation but it is not clear whether Australia supports continuation of the campaign and Trump’s threat to “rain hell” on Iran or if he believes action is strategically justified beyond its original objectives.
Crucially, he does not say what costs Australians should be prepared to bear in return for a noble victory, if there can be one.
Instead the Prime Minister finds himself wedged, like Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark, caught between passive suffering of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and taking arms in the war it entails.

A noble victory? That's what they're calling war crimes these days? The reported wreckage and remains of targeted and crashed US aircraft in central Iran on Sunday. Picture: Sepah News/AFP

For some reason, at that moment the careening Caterist careered off into the digital era...

If the tech-savvy, smart young things who advise Albanese thought their boss would be basking in adulation by the end of the week, they clearly underestimated popular intelligence. At a moment of genuine consequence – global instability, supply shocks and the risk of inflation tipping into recession – people expect leadership.
Yet the PM had almost nothing to say about the cause of the oil shortages that were the ostensible reason for commanding three minutes and 13 seconds of prime time: the US and Israeli military action against a despotic regime that presents a real and present danger to the peace-loving world.
Instead, he seeks to befog the debate with a checklist of policies that conveys a sense of busyness. His government is acting to keep Australia moving, to make the country stronger and fairer, stronger because it is fairer, recognising there is no security in maintaining a status quo that doesn’t work for people. On and on it goes, the rhetorical equivalent of hotel lobby music: short sentences and simple syntax, heavy in emotional legibility but low in analytical density, full of sound and fury and symbolising nothing.
It’s tempting to arrive at Byung-Chul Han’s dismal conclusion in his 2022 book Infocracy: Digitisation and the Crisis of Democracy, which argues democracy will not be defeated by censorship but by overload of information that fragments attention and dissolves shared meaning.
However much technology may dominate our lives, we must be wary of such deterministic narratives and remind ourselves that the pursuit of freedom that inspires democracy is not an ideological construct but a response to human nature.
The political leadership to navigate a path through the digital era in a way that strengthens rather than erodes democracy will one day emerge, even if it is not immediately apparent among current global leaders.

Thank you quarry meister and the pond will pay attention to all the digital lessons to be learned in the King Donald era ...

Forgotten already, her noble work already just digital fush and chups wrappings?

And here the pond was faced with an agonising choice, a bit like a mother caught between choosing one child over the other, when truly both are blessed...

Cruel, inhuman fiends for forcing the pond to make a choice...

Sadly the pond had to send simpleton Simon to the intermittent archive with a god speed and a teaser trailer ...

What a wondrous snap of a bemused, quizzical, perhaps a tad startled beefy boofhead from down Goulburn.

 How the pond was torn, how the pond would have loved to have stayed on with simpleton Simon, and shared the snap that immediately followed...of a man in proper, prayerful, gesticulating Easter form ...

Ye ancient cats and howling dogs, what ghostly figure is that in the background?

But the Major called, and the sacrifice was worth it, because Major Mitchell was dealing with the crisis in his own inimitable way ... by writing a stump speech for Pauline, outlining all the ways she could succeed, if only she followed his Major thoughts ...

The header: How economic decline and voter anger are fuelling the rise of One Nation; Political analysts once dismissed One Nation voters as globalisation’s losers, but the party now threatens to reshape Australian politics.

The caption for that leering Jimbo: Treasurer Jim Chalmers needs backing to use the May 12 budget to stimulate productivity and begin budget repair. Picture: Martin Ollman

The Major was in bigly five minute read form, and for once there wasn't much to appeal to readers of the Australian Daily Zionist News ...but it should produce oodles of converts to the Pauline cause ...

Thirty years ago, political analysts thought One Nation voters were the economic losers of globalisation.
Today globalisation is dead but One Nation is on the rise, polling a quarter of the vote.
Its rise reflects the decline in our nation’s political, media and business culture.
The timidity of both sides of politics since John Howard’s November 2007 election loss is eating away at their electoral support.
This column on February 8 quoted former ABC election analyst Antony Green suggesting Pauline Hanson’s party could win up to 25 federal seats if its support held up. That piece warned Labor might be the big winner as One Nation cannibalised Liberal and National Party seats.
Fast forward to the South Australian election on March 21. One Nation picked up three or four Lower House seats and the Liberals lost 11 to finish with five. Assorted independents won four.
Peter Malinauskas’s Labor government won seven extra seats to finish with 34 in the 47-seat Lower House.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap of that woman, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party has reeped (sic, the pond only records, and never corrects, being in something of a typo glass house without the wonders of a spell checker) the benefit of working class abandoning Labor. Picture: Martin Ollman.

The Major did his very best to make a good stump speech for Pauline and One Nation ... so many Major talking points...

The pattern could be repeated in Victoria on November 28, where One Nation seems certain to win seats and young Liberal leader Jess Wilson is being hurt by her party’s limitless propensity for self-harm, this time over the preselection of pro-women campaigner Moira Deeming.
It would be a travesty were Labor Premier Jacinta Allan to win with what is easily the worst record in government, state or federal, this century.
Former NSW premier Mike Baird in this newspaper on Wednesday said the economy had been growing at an average 2.5 per cent a year since 2011 but debt had been rising 3 per cent a year. This had left all levels of government with a $48bn annual interest bill.
This “is 2½ times what we spend on policing across the country, it is more than we spend on aged care, it is enough money to upgrade the Bruce Highway six times, build three WestConnex motorways or three Melbourne Metros each and every year”, Mr Baird wrote.
Australia is languishing with poor productivity and high population growth.
These problems disproportionately affect lower socio-economic demographics in the outer suburbs of our large cities, regional towns and rural Australia.
These are One Nation hot spots, and federal Labor knows it too could lose seats in places such as the Hunter.
Yet concern about high immigration is treated by much of the left media as a trojan horse for racism. Never mind few leaders in media, business or politics live in areas where new schools, roads, public transport, hospitals and jobs are not keeping up with population growth.
ABC journalists are more interested in non-means-tested welfare handouts than budget repair.
Productivity is treated as a way to squeeze more from the poor. Journalists have forgotten the 30 years of uninterrupted growth the productivity improvements of the 1980s and 90s gave Australia.
Kos Samaras, from the RedBridge polling group, in The Australian Financial Review on March 30, described the rise of One Nation as a “story about what happens when a significant cohort of Australians spends nearly two decades watching its world dismantled, its concerns dismissed and its votes treated as a problem to be managed rather than a signal to be heard”.
Samaras cites the closure of the car industry in Victoria and South Australia as the beginning of the end of Australian manufacturing.
Rapid declines in steelmaking, textiles, abattoirs and canneries shook the faith of “people with TAFE qualifications, trade certificates and decades of embodied knowledge the market, suddenly, had no use for”.
Samaras rejects the idea that One Nation voters are being manipulated.
“They have lived, for nearly two decades, through the managed decline of the world they were promised, and they have watched the institutions charged with their welfare either accelerate that decline or look away.”
For many, the bipartisan commitment to net-zero emissions is as big a threat to jobs as mass immigration is to living standards.
Labor’s primary vote is near historic lows, despite holding 94 of 150 federal seats. Facing an oil shock that will lift inflation past 5 per cent and could dramatically slow growth, our cautious PM needs to give Treasurer Jim Chalmers room to use the May 12 budget to stimulate productivity and begin budget repair.

The reptiles then slipped in a snap of Peter in the sort of head gear you need when taking pot shots of a Glock 9mm kind at writers' festivals ... Re-elected South Australian Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas. Picture: Eleni Tzanos (When I hear 'culture', I release the safety catch on my Browning!)

Then the Major carried on in reliable reptile renewables bashing way ...

It’s a nightmare for a Treasurer who looks like going into a slowdown with the prospect of at least two more interest rate rises this year.
After the GFC and Covid, Labor really should have been squirrelling away money from the mining boom to prepare for the next economic shock. Unfortunately its idea of reform has been about raising more tax and giving away more money.
Last week it signalled it is looking at the capital gains tax discount on investor housing. This may temporarily quiet complaints about housing affordability but is likely to raise much less money than the Greens claim, while investors will ramp up rents to offset the increased costs of tax changes.
The government – like Nationals leader Matt Canavan and Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie – talks about supply chain resilience and making more of what we need here.
Unfortunately, Labor’s Future Made in Australia policies look like an old-fashioned case of picking winners.
We were told last term that Australia was going to lead the world in green hydrogen and green steel. Albanese earmarked a billion taxpayer dollars for the “solar sunshot” plan to make solar panels here but little has happened.
It wold (sic, the pond merely transcribes) be far smarter to boost productivity in things Australia is good at: selling iron ore, coal, gas and uranium.

How about opening gas exploration in places such as Victoria?

Indeed, indeed ...

The fuel crisis shows the energy future3 has arrived. All Barnaby Joyce and One Nation have to offer is bluster ...

From early birds to emerging butterflies: UK shows signs of earliest spring on record ...

See where flowers and leaves arer emerging early after record-warm March ...

What could go wrong?

Trump wants to remake the way we fight wildfires. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

The new Wildland Fire Service will consolidate all Interior Department firefighting efforts as a lacking winter and ongoing drought promises a bad fire season. (Sorry, last two links to intermittent archive)

Well the pond did begin by wondering when we could return to getting back to turning an already dire planet into a worse one, in accordance with the lizard Oz's climate science denying agenda, and here we are, as the Major finishing scribbling his stump speech for Pauline ...

The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly on March 27 discussed the economic headwinds: inflation – already too high – being further pushed up by oil prices, growth constrained to 2 per cent, and productivity that Chalmers himself says will reach 1.2 per cent annual improvement, but not for another five years. Productivity growth in the Hawke, Keating and Howard years averaged 2.2 per cent.
Albanese and Chalmers have done too little to curb the cost blowout in the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
They encouraged trade union activism in a return to sector-wide industrial bargaining.
Now they plan universal child care rebates for all, up to a family income of $530,000 a year.
They handed out free money in power bill relief and are doing the same with the 50 per cent cut in petrol excise, which will only lift inflation. They used federal money to underwrite wages in aged care and child care, and boosted prices for consumers in the process.
Chalmers tried to hobble the Reserve Bank with a new oversight board: the RBA was then too slow to lift rates and too quick to cut them before last year’s election.
Labor has shored up bulk-billing with a package that delivers doctors $3 for every dollar saved on service delivery to patients.
Australians paying for this folly are moving to a protest party that at least acknowledges their problems.

Oh yes ...

... and the boot stickers were right there for the Major ...

Great days for the far reich ...

In which Polonius, true to breed is incredibly boring, while the bromancer is incredibly zealous...and all the pond wants for Easter is some chocolate.

 

By the way, the pond forgot to mention a few days ago the name of the biblical epic it watched as a build up to taking in the Coen brothers' piece of Hollywood fluff, Hail Caesar.

It was The Silver Chalice, which was honoured by Paul Newman's first feature film appearance and a remarkably silly plot (Newman hated the film).

The pond also took in Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs ...a complete Scorsese cult hoot, featuring a miscast Jack Hawkins and Joan Collins (ah, ancient days)

This one was risible because of the "let my people go" angle assigned to the designer of a mighty secure, mighty keen and peachy pyramid for the Pharaoh, with the architect played by a certain James Robertson Justice - leading to Egypt banning the film because of his allegedly Jewish looking nose.

The pond always enjoyed the way that Roman flicks, sword and sandal romps, and blue eyed white Jesus epics all merged into genre comedy (who could resist Gina and Yul and poor old George in Solomon and Sheba, and Victor Mature was a bible legend, whether The Robe or Samson and Delilah - watch him wrestle lions and Hedy Lamarr, and there's poor old George again). 

The pond has always had a soft spot for the biblical genre, though the pond was too young to enjoy DeMille's The Ten Commandments when it first landed in Tamworth.

But for some inexplicable reason it kept coming back on regular Xian seasonal rotation. The only reason the pond could think of? ...Tamworth, oh Tamworth.

The pond credits the film for helping nudge the pond towards atheism.

It features blatant and wretched myth-making of the kind that litters the old testament, much ripped from previous myth-makers, and even at an early age the pond could spot the dodgy special effects.

The parting of the Red Sea? Sublimely silly (though the pond did like all the signs and portents and the plagues and the blood in the water, not to mention all the rampant paganism). 

Swallowing that sort of Hollywood hokum is as credible as believing that there was an angry god committing genocide on a huge scale by flooding the world, just so that a select few could crowd onto an ark.

Growing up Catholic, the priests were too canny to go with literalist interpretations of the bible, but they showed other ways to fall. 

The pond remembers one bright young priest, handsome and engaging, who briefly rocked into town. His appearance saw many young women suddenly develop an overwhelming desire to turn up to mass.

One moment he was there, the next gone, with the pond's parents muttering about him being naughty. 

The pond didn't exactly understand the naughtiness, but would later get there by reading Boccaccio ... you know, priests with a fondness for mortar grinding with pestles. (Eighth day, second story, though a more modern, colloquial translation would help)

Never mind, that's just the pond's seasonal thoughts, and the pond will return to the topic down below, courtesy the bromancer.

But first the pond must get past a brooding Polonius, agitated by Malware and the pasty Hastie:

The header: A Hastie decision may sink the (Liberal) party; Malcolm Turnbull’s praise elevates Andrew Hastie’s profile, yet exposes policy tensions that could unsettle Liberal voters.

The caption for the downcast one:Andrew Hastie’s media performance fuels leadership speculation — and scrutiny of his policy views. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

May sink the Liberal party?

It's not already sunk?

It really is a bit of a sorry story that Polonius should only now be catching up with his prattle, and ignoring the Easter bunny season in the process.

Even more tiresome, this offering was just a standard four minute Polonial rant, with the upside that the reptiles saw no reason to interrupt with snaps or AVs after that opening visual flourish.

This meant the pond could race through it and get to the bromancer more quickly:

It was a somewhat unfortunate accident of timing. On March 27 the news.com.au website carried a story about Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal Party he once led.
Turnbull was quoted as saying: “Australian politics is determined by the centre and unfortunately … the only political party that is operating at the centre of Australian politics is the Labor Party.” This read like a suggestion that Liberal Party voters should vote Labor – delivered on the eve of the South Australian election.
Turnbull criticising the party that made it possible for him to become prime minister is not news. He has been bagging his former political colleagues since August 2018 when he lost the support of his partyroom and was replaced by Scott Morrison.
Last Sunday Andrew Hastie, the Liberal member for the West Australian seat of Canning since September 2015 and opposition industry and sovereign capability spokesman, was interviewed for 22 minutes on ABC TV’s Insiders.
To some viewers, at least, this looked like a pitch for the Liberal Party leadership, although Hastie later distanced himself from this. But it was an impressive performance since the former Special Air Service Regiment officer has the ability to get a message across. The nature of the message was something else.
Not long after the interview, the Australian Financial Review online ran an article by Ronald Mizen, “Andrew Hastie reveals ‘father-son dynamic’ with unlikely mentor Malcolm Turnbull”. Turnbull was quoted as saying about Hastie: “I’m sure he’ll be Liberal leader one day, I’d be amazed if he isn’t.” He said Hastie “spoke from a position of knowledge when it comes to national security and, even if you disagree with him, he is a well read, thoughtful person who didn’t just parrot talking points”.

The pond hates it when the reptiles refuse to provide links ...

Andrew Hastie reveals unlikely friendship with Malcolm Turnbull (why should the pond do all the worrying about intermittent archive links?)

Of course if you listen to 2GB, which the pond never does, it was all a mistake ...

Andrew Hastie has categorically denied having Malcolm Turnbull as a mentor.
The senior Liberal told Clinton Maynard people have “unhelpfully” focused on a story in the Australian Financial Review.
“I’m my own man with my own mind,” he said.

It's not the pond's fault that Polonius is being unhelpful.

It's getting so that the pond has about much faith in Easter bunnies as it does in Polonius ...

For his part, Hastie said he was “glad to have his friendship even if we’ve had our disagreements over the years”. He said Turnbull “was only a few years behind my dad at Sydney Grammar so we have a common link”.
Turnbull told Mizen a key question about Hastie’s leadership prospects was whether he could outgrow the right-wing politics that “destroyed the party” and outline a vision for the country that most voters could get behind.
Turnbull maintains the Liberals’ move to the right “destroyed the party”. But the evidence suggests otherwise. In the past half-century, only three Liberals have led their party to office after prevailing over Labor; namely, Malcolm Fraser (who won office for three terms), John Howard (who was in office for four terms) and Tony Abbott (who won in 2013 but was replaced by Turnbull in 2015).

Uh oh, correspondents know where this is heading: a Polonial history lesson.

On the bright side, no mention of the ABC yet, though the wretches soon get involved, with that interview ...

When they came to office in 1975, 1996 and 2013, respectively, Fraser, Howard and Abbott were political conservatives. It was Turnbull who attempted to move the Liberal Party to the left (what he would call the centre). In the process the party lost 14 seats to Labor at the 2016 election and nearly lost the election; shedding, in the process, the seats Abbott had won from the Gillard-Rudd government in 2010 and 2013.
Turnbull remains embittered at being replaced by Morrison. He will not accept that a leader who determines the timing of an election and the party’s policy program and loses 14 seats is unlikely to prevail until the following election.
It is not clear whether Turnbull’s support for Hastie will do the latter much good among Liberals. Towards the end of his interview with David Speers, Hastie proclaimed: “I think multinationals and big business in this country have lost their social licence.” What – all of them? This sounds like an editorial in, say, the Green Left Weekly.
When asked why he was “so open to negative gearing, capital gains tax changes”, Hastie replied: “I just think we’ve got to – this is a new era.” The official position of the Liberal Party – as provided by leader Angus Taylor, deputy leader Jane Hume and opposition Treasury spokesman Tim Wilson – is that increasing taxes is not the way to increase home ownership.

Ah, the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way. What an inspiration ...

The pond thought that there were never any conservative voices on the ABC, but that's probably because the pasty Hastieis no conservative. Or so Polonius suggests.

Time for the closing gobbet ...

Hastie told Speers he was “open-minded” about government imposing a windfall profit tax on gas exports. His reason? Well, “the Liberal Party is not the first line of defence for corporate Australia”. Perhaps it should be. After all, corporate Australia is responsible for 20 per cent of federal government revenue each year.
Then there is foreign policy. Hastie described the decision of Donald Trump to bomb Iran as “a huge miscalculation”. Some will agree with Hastie, others not so. But the question arises whether this is a wise comment for a senior opposition spokesman to make since the sad fact is that without the US alliance this nation would not be able to protect the sea lanes and air lanes against an aggressor.
Sometimes it makes sense to remain silent. After all, Trump said at the start of hostilities that the US’s intention was to destroy Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons. This position was supported at the time by Anthony Albanese and his Labor government. A stance with which the Coalition agreed.
Some of Hastie’s views will appeal to Labor, teals and Greens voters. But this does not mean they will vote for the Coalition. He correctly regards One Nation as a threat to the Liberals. But Hastie, despite his appeal, will not gain votes for the Coalition from One Nation by moving to the left.
According to Turnbull, the Liberal Party ought to be talking about the economy. It is. But Turnbull overlooks the fact that Hastie opposes net-zero emissions by 2050 and advocates the use of coal – positions Turnbull despises.
Hastie’s Insiders interview attracted attention. However, it indicated that the talented opposition spokesman would be advised to give more thought to policy outcomes before he talks at length.

Did the pastie Hastie have a moment of introspection?

"What would it be like to have foreign commandos kicking in our doors at night the way we were kicking in the doors of Pashtun families?" (here)

Good question, but if you think starting up new Holden and Ford plants is the answer, perhaps it's the wrong question.

And that sudden self-awareness noted, the more the likes of Polonius carries on, flogging this dead creationist spawn horse to talk up the beefy boofhead, the more the pond is inclined to start up a lettuce v. prime Angus competition.

And now as a warm up to the bromancer, let the lizard Oz editorialist celebrate the season...

Inspirational stuff ... it's as if the lizard Oz theologian hadn't yet caught up with the divergence between Jewish and Xian definitions of the one long absent lord ...

The essential difference between Jews and Christians is that Christians accept Jesus as messiah and personal savior. Jesus is not part of Jewish theology. Amongst Jews, Jesus is not considered a divine being. Therefore all holidays that have a connection to the life of Jesus are not part of Jewish life and/or practice (Christmas, Easter, Lent, Advent, Palm Sunday, etc.). (here)

In short, one or the other of the two mobs have got it completely wrong, and the losers will be off to hell in due course.

Could it be the Catholics because they're so clueless they've been banned from having a mass at the Pentagon by Pete Kegsbreath? (Oh dear, tykes go to war with war and Hogsbreath, *archive link)

And with introductions over, sound the trumpets, bang the drums wildly, because the pond can now attend - thanks to the bromancer - to seasonal duties:

The header: A heart attack, talk with God and why Easter offers hope this fractured world needs now; In a time of great despair, the resurrection of Jesus after crucifixion – the birth of a new and elevated humanism – remains the greatest source of cheer.

The caption: Greg Sheridan and wife Jessie at home on Friday. Sheridan suffered a heart attack in January and it was Jessie who “brought me back with some CPR”. Picture: Brad Fleet

The bromancer embarked on a cunning strategy to disarm the pond by beginning with sundry personal touches, touching perhaps but not the best way to do theology.

The pond has also had a heart attack, and didn't find it a reason to begin thinking about life in hell.

Instead the pond looked at that opening snap, and wondered what the bromancer made of all those assaults on migrants in the lizard Oz?

It almost looked like an Usha/couch-molesting JD situation.

Never mind ...

It’s funny the things you think, when you think you might be about to die. At Easter, it’s worth considering death and resurrection. In January I suffered a heart attack, which was distressing for my wife, Jessie, less so for me because I was unconscious for the most exciting bits.
Jessie brought me back with some CPR, an ambulance whisked me to Geelong public hospital which, on a weekend night, was a good microcosm of Australian life. The fellow in the next cubicle was handcuffed to his bed, with a solid policeman for company. Nurses and doctors coped superbly with the sometimes chaotic variety of humanity in distress.

Cue an ambulance, because so many have never seen one or can afford one ... Ambulances outside Geelong hospital's emergency department, where Greg Sheridan was taken after a heart attack.

The pond's partner did the same - that's what watching Black Mirror will do - but in the car and to the RPA, wherein were many angels in human, practical and professional form.

But still there was no reason to refer to the long absent lord because the pond didn't spot Her on the way into the operating theatre ...

Next day, for various clinical reasons, I was sent to the Victorian Heart Hospital in Melbourne’s Clayton. It’s a magnificent facility – gleaming, clever machines; careful, competent people. Everyone there – nurses of many backgrounds, folks serving food, cardiologist Rob Gooley – exhibits technical skill and a kind of natural, undramatic human solidarity.
I was first diagnosed with serious heart disease at 37, had quintuple bypass surgery at 56, a stent a year later and now, 12 years after that, a new stent where the old one failed, plus a loop monitor inserted to watch the rhythm (growing older now means becoming a cyborg, with bits of clever metal junk strewn around the body).
There are things wrong with Australia, but it’s a great country to get sick in.
So I’ve had a long time to think these things over. The strangest element of this most recent episode was that while unconscious I had the strongest sense of talking to God; not a transforming feeling of God’s presence, just a clear sense of what I was saying to him. And that was: I’m sorry. I repeated it again and again. I thought I was saying it out loud.
It wasn’t said in despair, it’s just what I urgently wanted to say. I’m not a secret axe murderer and these words had no political content but, of course, there’s a lot to forgive.
There’s a paradox in Christian belief. Christianity hates death. It proclaims the defeat of death. That’s the message of Easter. Paul, in his first letter to the Christians in Corinth, proclaims: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

The pond gets it. 

Fear of death is what motivates all sorts of cults, and leads the bible to advise that the path to hell is to indulge in graven images.

Oops, that needs a lot of theological finessing - paintings allowed, just no worshipping allowed - because then  ... Calvary by Andrea Mantegna, depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ

Is it too early for a spoiler?

Should the pond note that this is really just another way for the bromancer to flog his book?

Paul is clear about Christianity’s most radical, supernatural (weird?) belief, that all people will live for all eternity in a new version of their physical bodies. Paul: “For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.”
Jesus says, in Mark’s account, that the God of Abraham is “the God not of the dead, but of the living”. This doesn’t mean God forgets about you when you die. Instead, you’ll live forever. Death, which is a profound alienation from the true human condition, the condition in perfect harmony with God, is defeated in Jesus, who rose from the dead and proclaims eternal life for all.
Without God, every human being would stand constantly on the brink of disaster and oblivion. The attitude to death, and the promise of eternal life, was a stark contradiction between early Christians and the pagan Greco-Roman world around them.
Before Jesus’ Easter resurrection, humanity was extraordinarily glum about death, which was thought to be the dismal end of all lives. In Sophocles’s famous play, Oedipus questions: “What’s the use of glory … if in its flow it streams away to nothing?” Marcus Aurelius, newly familiar from the Gladiator movies and momentarily fashionable again, grimly concluded: “Fame after life is no better than oblivion.”
The classical poets weren’t any cheerier. Virgil wrote of “death unpitying sweep them from the scene”. Homer said all human beings ended in “the dark mist of death”. Catullus similarly: “There is one endless night that we must sleep.” In the Iliad, Homer had Zeus declare: “There is nothing alive more agonised than man.”

Ah, it's book flogging time with petulant Peta ...

The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan has discussed his book, ‘Christians: The urgent case for Jesus in our world’, with Sky News host Peta Credlin. “One reason I love writing about Christianity is because I can actually be positive about it,” Mr Sheridan said. “The culture is turning its back on Christianity very comprehensively; one reason for writing this book is that as a result of that, there’s a certain crisis of knowledge, very few people now even really know what the content of Christianity is. “But one of my favourite chapters in the book, one that I had most fun writing was about the treatment of Christianity in popular culture.”

Time to bring in a herd of fellow Xians shouting to the sky ...

Easter revolutionised the human condition. It cheered up the human race. Easter, Christianity, gave birth to a new and elevated humanism. The belief in resurrection and eternal life celebrates transcendent value in the whole human being, body and soul. This tradition began in Judaism, in Genesis, which declares that human beings are made in the likeness and image of God. These traditions are the foundation of universal human rights.
Imago Dei, the image of God, men and women as heirs to eternal life. The early Christians were devoted to this understanding. That made Christians cheerful while pagans were glum, even though Christians also knew they generally had a lot to repent of in their own lives.
Christianity thus has the most elevated view of human nature, of the human being, in all of history. But with this elevated status, this transcendent significance, comes responsibility. Not that you must be perfect but you need to try, and you’re accountable, yet you can be forgiven. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, at the end of his enthralling book Believe, asks all his readers: “Life is short, and death is certain, and what account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along? That you took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design?”
Jesus also offers love and forgiveness. But the thunderclap of Easter is that the world is transformed by this momentous event. In one of Douthat’s favourite Christian books (and one of mine), The Everlasting Man, GK Chesterton recalls the first Easter: “On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth.”

Um, the pond must have missed theology 101, because how can that be? 

Wasn't the trinitarian Christ part of god way back when, in the times when god was committing floodwater genocide? (Where's a Caterist when he's needed?)

Okay, trinitarian theology never made the slightest bit of sense, not helped by GKC being as thick as your average Edwardian brick ... English journalist GK Chesterton. (Sssh, don't mention "the Jewish problem")

At this point the bromancer tries to get serious, but leaves all the heavy lifting to Douthat, a man notably as mad as a both siderist NY Times hatter ...

Humanity frequently needs reminding to take itself seriously. In matters of religious belief, there is, and of course should be, no coercion. Many people without religious belief recognise social and cultural value in the Judeo-Christian tradition. That’s good. But Christians should never make those flimsy, anaemic, utilitarian arguments their main pitch to the world, so to speak, even if confessing belief explicitly can seem a little embarrassing.
Easter only really counts if it’s true, if Jesus actually rose from the dead and lives forever with his father in heaven, waiting to welcome us. If it’s not actually true, if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead in his body, I’d rather be at the races.

He'd rather watch horses go around in a circle, in what is loosely dubbed a "sport"? Now that's weird, the pond hadn't picked the bromancer as a gambling man, because surely gambling and seeing the odd horse die are the best reasons to head off to the track.

Douthat persuasively argues the historical authenticity of the gospels and other New Testament writings. The shift in modern scholarship on this question is overwhelming. He also persuasively advances the sheer, irrefutable, witness quality of the gospel accounts.
JRR Tolkien, the genius who wrote The Lord of the Rings, called the resurrection the “eucatastrophe”, the unexpected, dram­atic event leading to the happiest ending, the outbreak of impossible joy. But the resurrection comes only after Jesus’ passion and crucifixion. Resurrection after the suffering of life and death. I challenge anyone to read the crucifixion accounts and not be moved by the visceral immediacy, the graphic impact, of the experience.
Jesus, though himself God, suffers the shocking, terrifying alienation of intense suffering. Tempted to despair, yet he doesn’t despair. He promises the good thief, crucified beside him, that “today you will be with me in paradise”. Almost his last words are to ask his best friend, John, to look after his mother, Mary. Finally, complete surrender to God the father: “Into your hands, I commend my spirit.” Then the resurrection.
Truly, it’s the greatest story ever told. We can all hope in the resurrection. This fractured world has seldom needed Easter’s hope more than now.

Oh he's risen all right, see how he floats in a rapture ...

Shucks, the pond almost forgot the plug, because there are many ways to make sucker Xians part with a shekel or two ...

Greg Sheridan’s latest book, How Christians Can Succeed Today: Reclaiming the Genius of the Early Church, is published by Allen & Unwin.

What else? 

Well the tinkling Trinca was out and about this day, though she steered well clear of the white Xian nationalism that frequently litters the lizard Oz pages ...

The pond thought about it, but then looked at the time on the clock.

Seven minutes!

It was unendurable, it was a waste of time better spent hunting for chocolate ...

The pond personally supervised its listing in the intermittent archive ...

Australia: Are we patriots, nationalists or something else entirely?
From Federation to One Nation, historians and commentators debate whether nationalism unites Australians — or risks dividing them.

Just in case the archive fell over, as it often does, the pond thought it would do a spoiler and cut to the conclusion, only because Greg of the 'Gong turned up, a name long absent from the lizard Oz and so from the pond...

“There’s probably not as much consensus as there might be about the symbols of civic identity in Australia,” Bonnell says. “In America, the flag is revered; in Australia, we’re not sure … We have a symbolically weak civic nationalism.”
His students don’t know much about our political institutions: “They struggle with explaining the basics of the Australian Constitution or the federal system. We have a pragmatic version of civic nationalism – we kind of muddle along and get along – but it’s not based on very strong attachment to shared symbols or to a deep knowledge of what the political institutions are.”
Historian Frank Bongiorno of the University of Canberra says our nationalism has not been as distinctive as the American version because of its British Empire origins; the nationalism that emerged after Federation was “a kind of a post-imperial nationalism”. The US broke dramatically with its British past but there was no such defining moment here. Australia may be hard-pressed to date the emergence of a national sensibility. Historians suggest it emerged in the 60s as a response to our distress/anger at being sidelined by the Poms in favour of the European Economic Community. That’s when we began to “craft our own symbols”, Bongiorno says, in what became a major project.
Civic nationalism is clearer in the US. Says Bongiorno: “The US constitution sits at the heart of what it means to be American. In Australia we have not seen civic identity as being at the heart of our identity.” We looked elsewhere – to the landscape and to Anzac, which once may have been encased in military value but increasingly has morphed into softer values around mateship, for example. We lack iconic figures such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who serve as symbols of civic nationalism, and settle instead for sport stars or perhaps Simpson and his donkey, or Sir John Monash, Bongiorno says.

Yes, it's on that flag waving level of vacuity ...

Now come on down Greg of the sometime 'Gong ... (the pond isn't sure about this "previously") ...

In the 70s we tried to use multiculturalism as a way to define the country but that concept has lost favour in recent years, under pressure from a much more ethnically diverse population.
Historian Greg Melleuish, previously of the University of Wollongong, says there was a very Australian nationalism articulated in the magazine The Bulletin from the 1880s. It was a “particular type of nationalism, very masculinist, didn’t like religion very much, republican, and it was against the sort of effete English (culture)”. Two world wars helped keep Australia in the British camp despite an education system that focused more on the Australian story, albeit with the message that “we were Australians but members of the empire – an idea that did not start to die out until the 1960s”, says Melleuish.
He points out, too, that a lot of Australian nationalism in the 20th century was about literature and art, and cites publisher Reginald “Inky” Stephensen, who was a leading figure in the rise of radical Australian nationalism in the 30s. Stephensen began by arguing for cultural independence from Britain but ended up espousing far-right ideas.
“He was a rather nasty man,” says Melleuish. “He was an antisemite, among other things, but he had this idea that Australia varied from Britain because the environment was different and therefore Australians wrote about different things, they had different experiences. The kernel of Australian nationalism was the relationship of people to their environment. That’s why a lot of Australian nationalism was literary nationalism.”
He says The Bulletin’s nationalism “was all about autarky, about being self-sufficient” and contemporary economic conditions are pushing us towards a nationalism about “standing on your own two feet”.
“A lot of the criticism of internationalism in the last few weeks is ‘Why did we let industries go? Why aren’t we more self-sufficient? How the hell did we end up with two oil refineries?’ But … whatever happens, Australia will always be dependent on international trade. That’s a reality, and nationalism has to deal with that.
“A lot of the discourse, I suspect, will be about should we build up our own industries or should we continue supplying the rest of the world, which is partly what we’ve done for so long. If you think about it, that comes out of being originally on the periphery of empire – that’s what Australia was set up to do, it was set up to supply raw materials … if you want to see nationalism as a sort of autarkic self-reliance, that’s not possible. We don’t have the capability.”

Wrong message, Greg sometime of the 'Gong. 

The reptiles have their saviour to hand,  and it's the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth, and we must do our best to Make Australia Awesome Again:

Fear not, thanks to the bromancer and the reptiles, we've always got AUKUS.

And now just to keep the theology thingie going, recently there came news that the couch-molesting JD thinks that UFO aliens are in reality demons ...

It all heads back to that piece featured in Wired, by Laura Bullard, way back in 2025...

The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession(*intermittent archive link)
Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since.

With Thiel recently in Rome delivering anti-Christ lectures, what better way to spend an Easter than contemplating the deep weirdness of America?

ABH... always be hustling...

Their tiny church is on the cover of JD Vance’s new book. They don’t know him.

The members of a Methodist church in rural Virginia are excited — if a little confused — that the vice president’s memoir of his path to Catholicism has put them in the spotlight. (*intermittent archive link)

This is the current fallback for the US Presidency, Thiel's lapdog ...

And this is news of the current incumbent ...