In which the Angelic one sets the pace for prattling Polonius, the disgraced Pelluzzo and the lizard Oz editorialist...

 

Knock the pond down with a feather and pleased, do it gently.

The pond had to do a double take, and then save this lizard Oz piece for the meditative Sunday outing ...

Amidst all the war mongering and carry on that came with yesterday's Australian Daily Zionist News, the Angelic one turned up with this ...

Two Anzac brothers’ horror: gassed, amputated, traumatised
A family’s sixth-generation Australian story reveals the devastating truth about what happened when young men ignored warnings about a ‘foreign war’.
By Angela Shanahan

It's there in the intermittent archive.

The pond didn't need to relive the "great" war narrative through the lives the Angelic one  describes.

There are millions of such stories, and this is the time of year the pond gets triggered and is reminded of a deeply unhappy grandfather who served as a machine gunner in the battle of the Somme.

He returned home a shell of a man, tormented by nightmares, and the pond doesn't need to be reminded of his alcohol-fuelled rages.

But the Angelic one's wrap up to her piece commanded the pond's attention ...

...After the war both brothers felt fortunate to get out of the army alive. Neither was interested in Anzac Day and, like most returned soldiers, would not speak outside the family about something they regarded as unspeakable. Instead they both carried on in their careers. Fred had a family and drove a specially altered Buick car. Ernest stayed in the family tailoring business, always immaculately dressed, and spent many long afternoons at the races with handy visits to us in Randwick.
When I hear very young people today parroting jingoistic claptrap they have overheard about the original Anzacs “fighting for Australia”, I always think about those two, who fortunately survived to realise the error of joining in 1915. I also think about them when I hear failed politicians, commentators and other armchair warriors wanting “boots on the ground” for yet another failed enterprise on the other side of the world – just as futile as that war that was supposed to end all wars.

Say what?

The pond was beguiled and entranced by the Angelic one's talk of jingoistic claptrap - of the kind that litters the lizard Oz - followed by talk of commentators and armchair warriors wanting boots on the ground for yet another failed enterprise. 

It's as if she'd read the bromancer and the dog botherer, and decided to take aim at those failed commentators and armchair warriors, and by extension the whole of the useless rag.

Who knew that the pond and the Angelic one could share a moment?

Who knew she'd preemptively dismiss all that claptrap that turns up down below?

It made the pond's day, it lifted the spirits, and it was sorely needed because ... prattling Polonius ... armchair warrior and failed commentator supreme ...

The header: Australian War Memorial becomes a battleground; Critics claim Anzac Day no longer connects with multicultural Australia, but the commemoration remains vital for a nation built on sacrifice and democratic values.

The caption which doesn't identify the rogues who decided to drag a Shetland pony into the affair: Soldiers of the 1st Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (1RAR), march through the town of Charters Towers as part of the Anzac Day Parade along with their unit mascot Septimus Quintus.

It didn't take Polonius long to get into war monger mode ...

It’s increasingly fashionable among the left intelligentsia these days to query the point of Anzac Day. Come to think of it, mocking April 25 and what it stands for was around in the 1960s. What’s different now is that a target of the criticism is the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Last Monday, historian Peter Stanley was interviewed by David Marr on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live program. Stanley maintains that the Australian War Memorial turned itself into a tourist attraction 20 years ago. Presumably it’s a case of “travellers” looking down on mere “tourists”.
It was one of those interviews where Marr essentially agreed with Stanley and Stanley essentially agreed with Marr.
Asked about the challenges to the way in which we will celebrate Anzac Day in the near future, Stanley replied that one of the big differences is the sheer changes in Australian demography. He said the Australia that created Anzac Day was 95 per cent, or thereabouts, Anglo-Celtic.
Stanley’s argument is that, if we are not careful, we will have a society in which a section has, at times, an intense but mostly lukewarm connection to Anzac Day. And another large minority that feels no connection to April 25.
We shall see. It is my experience that crowds at Anzac Day football matches these days are probably more attentive to the remembrance part of the occasion than they were a half-century ago when commercial sport was first played on April 25.

The pond was bemused. 

Is Polonius a footy freak, so much so that he's attended matches for half a century and so is in a position to provide a judicious survey and summary of the mood of the punters.

Does he have a team?

It seems so ...

The great Gerard Henderson, the Executive Director of the Sydney Institute is from Melbourne. He loves his AFL, and I couldn’t resist referring to his beloved Essendon Football Club, which, just like the Liberal Party, had once experienced success but now had fallen on hard times and was accused by its critics of ‘lacking an identity’. (Essendon hasn’t won a final in twenty years.) (Here)

So he's a fanatic, and worse, a loser fanatic, and the pond couldn't help but think less of him for it ...as Polonius went on to serve up some standard Australian Daily Zionist News fare ...

Stanley’s experience is of a Canberra-based academic who was the principal historian at the Australian War Memorial between 1980 and 2007. That is, before it (allegedly) became a tourist attraction.
What I have noticed has been different about Anzac Day in the Sydney CBD in recent years is the appearance of large concrete boulders at or near the path of the Anzac Day march.
By April 25, they will have been moved in place to protect the men, women and children who will be participating in or watching the procession. The concrete slabs complement the bollards that have appeared gradually on Australian city streets since the terrorist attack on the US on September 11, 2001.
Sadly, there were no concrete barriers or bollards or adequate NSW Police protection in place on December 14 last year when Australia experienced its worst terrorist attack in history. The shooters were followers of radical Islam who chose to target the Jewish Australian community gathered at Bondi Beach to celebrate the Jewish feast of Hanukkah. As The Australian reported on April 23, Islamic State has urged Muslims to follow the example of the Bondi shooters.
According to Stanley, April 25 should be devoted to commemorating “the people who arrive in this country having experienced war first-hand, not wars that Australians were involved in but wars that they were involved in”. He mentioned Sudanese, Afghans, Congolese and Rwandans. But not, for some reason, the Vietnamese. Maybe because they were/are overwhelmingly anti-communist.

The pond suspects that Polonius will never be able to let go the way the Vietnam war went down. 

Cf Appropriate time to debunk myths of Vietnam War; So much misinformation is still propagated about Australia’s most controversial military engagement. Most of it on the ABC.

Inter alia ...

The pond particularly likes that last one ...

Myth: Australians fought and died in Vietnam in vain. As Edwards acknowledges in his official history, the US-led commitment in Vietnam delayed a communist victory by a decade. Former Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew pointed out that the time delay meant the non-communist nations of Southeast Asia were better able to withstand communist insurgencies in the mid-1970s than if they had taken place earlier.

... (a) because of what happened in Southeast Asian countries of the Cambodian kind after a dinkum Kissingering, and (b) because there's not that much difference between the soft authoritarianism of the government of Singapore and other forms of authoritarian rule.

But the pond digresses ...

This overlooks the fact Australia is what it is today – a tolerant democracy – because others have fought and died for the nation.
As John Terraine pointed out in his book The Great War 1914-18 (Hutchinson, 1965), Australia played a key role in the military victories on the Western Front that led to the defeat of imperial Germany. So did other parts of what was called the British Empire – namely, India, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa – during the course of the conflict.
Left-wing journalist John Pilger always claimed that Australia fought what he termed “other people’s wars”. This overlooked the fact that in 1914-18 Germany was a Pacific power and a German victory would have led to a different Australia than exists today.
At the end of the war, the First Australian Imperial Force was led by Sir John Monash – a Jewish Australian of Prussian background. It is a matter of record that when he marched in the Anzac Day procession, Monash and his comrades did not need the protection of concrete slabs and bollards.

And so there came more cognitive dissonance for the pond, what with "a tolerant democracy" being followed by a mention of Monash, who definitely needed protection from the Melbourne Club's black ball.

In fact Monash ... had declined membership in a prominent Melbourne club because that club had a rule barring Jews and he “would not give the club the opportunity to make distinctions in his case.” (here)

In fact, the Melbourne club continued its bigotry for a long time - witness Thomas Keneally getting agitated about the club in February 1994 (Trove link)

It seems it's not just idle lefties that can claim a history of anti-Semitism - the Melbourne establishment knew how to do it in style.

And now it's time for the final Polonial gobbet ...

The Australian Defence Force also played an important role in the military victories over Nazi Germany in northern Africa, imperial Japan in the Pacific and in assisting South Korea to hold off aggression from communist North Korea. The ADF helped non-communist South Vietnam to hold out against communist North Vietnam for a decade. In the words of former Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, this delay helped stabilise Southeast Asia between the mid-1960s and the mid-70s. A smaller ADF force performed well in Afghanistan and Iraq in extremely difficult circumstances.
The point that Stanley overlooks is that, without the survival of a democratic Australia, the refugees who came to this country in recent decades would not be here.
Moreover, Stanley ignores the fact many immigrants who arrived in Australia before and after 1945 and their descendants understand Australia and appreciate the security and high living standards it has provided. There will be many Australians of non-Anglo Celtic background honouring the fallen on April 25.
Despite the prevalence of the alienated left in educational institutions and sections of the media, patriotism in Australia is still alive. As someone who has opposed One Nation since it emerged 30 years ago, it is a regrettable fact that the movement has benefited because, in some sense, Australia is not the nation it once was.
According to a recent study by the Australian Population Research Institute in Melbourne, “there is a large patriotic constituency who are potentially mobilisable around right-leaning causes”. The study calls them “Australian Firsters” who are patriots with a strong sense of belonging to Australia. Their number is estimated at 60 per cent.
The study finds that what it calls “Australia’s surge to the right” occurred following “the sustained pro-Palestine and anti-Israel street protests” in late 2025 and early 2026. Along with the Bondi massacre. The task of the Coalition and Labor is to win back as many of these patriotic Australians as possible. Many will be gathered honouring the fallen on April 25. Including those at the Australian War Memorial where the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier can be found.

As soon as Polonius mentioned that study, the pond had to go and look it up. 

Unfortunately there was no direct link to the study (in docx form) but maybe it'll hang around in discoverable form on the site for a while.

This was the pitch for it ...

Australia’s surge to the right: How far can it go?
April 2026
Bob Birrell, Katharine Betts and Ernest Healy
Since November 2025 opinion polls have shown a surge towards One Nation. In the voluminous media commentary, the dominant view is that this surge is due to the cost of living and other household budget issues. A few commentators have suggested that it may reflect Australian’ patriot feelings.
This report shows that much of the surge to the right does come from the concerns of patriots. Previous TAPRI surveys indicate that just over half of Australian voters can be described as patriots. What they have in common is that they share a sense of belongingness to Australia ‘to a great extent’.
This patriotic constituency is opposed to the prevailing neoliberal economic orthodoxy and to its associated progressive views on cultural values. This constituency is especially opposed to high immigration and to policies promoting multiculturalism.
It is these voters who are driving the surge to the right in Australia, as manifested in the rise of One Nation in opinion polls.

It struck the pond as incredibly sloppy, and therefore right in Polonius's turf. 

The definition of "patriot" is nebulous and flung around with wild abandon, and it's nakedly political ...

...the neoliberal insistence on free trade has meant that Australian is now dependent on unreliable international supply chains. In the case of petrochemical products and refined petrol and diesel fuels, the loss of productive capacity in Australia has left us highly vulnerable. 
Living in Melbourne we are in the front line of casualties. This is because the Victorian Government, since 2014, has built its economic strategy on providing debt-financed infrastructure and services for Melbourne’s surging population. It proclaims, without complaint from progressive media circles, and with bipartisan support from the Liberal Party, that Melbourne is targeting a population of eight million by 2050 – the same level as in London today. 
From our perspective, the right surge promises an overdue correction.  

Well the authors might think a surge to Pauline and One Nation is the way to go, and to hell with that.

What was that, Angelic one?

...When I hear very young people today parroting jingoistic claptrap they have overheard about the original Anzacs “fighting for Australia”, I always think about those two, who fortunately survived to realise the error of joining in 1915. I also think about them when I hear failed politicians, commentators and other armchair warriors wanting “boots on the ground” for yet another failed enterprise on the other side of the world – just as futile as that war that was supposed to end all wars.

Darn tootin' ...and now for a distraction.

While checking up on ancient Polonial lore, the pond couldn't help but faint with it delight when it discovered by accident Humphrey McQueen's memories of Ming in The Forgotten Fascists, for Arena back in March 2025.

As this came from the time of the impending second world war, it seemed vaguely relevant to the lizard Oz's crusades ...

Oh dear, and so history repeats, wash and rinse and hang out to dry ...

And so to the search for a bonus ...

The pond immediately ruled out the disgraced Pezzullo, still being offered a rehabilitation tour by the reptiles ...

‘Lest we forget’ also means being ready for coming war
Conflict is not just in our past; it is in our future. Will we stand up for what’s worth fighting for?
By Mike Pezzullo

The pond has had an overdose of war mongering, especially from those who will never have to dodge a bullet.

A teaser trailer will suffice, because the disgraced cardigan wearer opened with an image of that fatted beast, as if we should be getting ready for a coming war with that banana republic and its risible, demented, sundowning leadership...

That outing ended with the sort of rhetorical flourish offered by someone who will never have to head into battle and find out what it's like to be shot at ...

...Will we have the fortitude to calculate the odds of war and to prepare accordingly, even as we abhor war? Will we have the moral clarity to calculate the cost of war and the price of peace? Will we be prepared to make the same sacrifices that we rightly honour on Saturday, for the sake of future generations?
Odds are, we may be tested soon enough. If we are to be ready, strategic and moral rearmament will be necessary. Or, in saying “never again”, are we really saying that such sacrifices are always senseless and unnecessary? Are we really saying we would not be prepared to make the same ultimate sacrifice in a just cause?
On Saturday, we need to steel ourselves for the wars of the future as we reflect on those of the past.

The reptiles offered a credit which lacked a crucial word ...

Mike Pezzullo was secretary of the former department of immigration and border protection (2014-17) and the Department of Home Affairs (2017-23).

Can someone help the pond?

Yes, that's the word:

Mike Pezzullo was the disgraced secretary of the former department of immigration and border protection (2014-17) and the Department of Home Affairs (2017-23), a mandarin who brought great shame on mandarins ...

Fixed it, and with a link to go ...

The pond supposes it could have looked at Cameron Stewart ...

Trump faces dwindling options in Iran conflict with no clear path to victory

The US President is scrambling to secure a peace and avoid humiliation. Can he do it?

But it was a long read to arrive at not much ...

The US President’s best hope now is a deal that leads to a meaningful delay in Iran’s ability to build a nuclear bomb as part of a wider agreement that includes an open and free Strait of Hormuz. These are minimalist aims compared with Trump’s once grandiose predictions of a new Iran and a new Middle East. But they appear to be the best-case outcome from a war that continues to confound the expectations of Trump and his team.

A bit like the mad king lashing out in revenge on the Falklands and Maggie Thatcher's legacy.

And so in lieu of a reptile column, the pond turned to the lizard Oz editorialist, source of the heart of darkness, for a summary of this weekend's war mongering ...

Shameless really, not even being allowed to remember and mourn the dead, but instead have the occasion serve as preparations for fresh war mongering ...

Now there was a completely useless war, however it ended - certainly not to the advantage of Afghan women or the Afghanis who helped American forces and now as a reward are facing deportation to the Congo.

As for the presumption of innocence, it's already been established on the balance of probabilities that Ben Roberts-Smith is guilty of war crimes and was intending to scarper to Spain, and that's enough for the pond, but it didn't stop the reptiles from running a very large hagiographic snap ...

Then it was on to the final gobbet ...

Shameless ... completely shameless, and there at the very end, once again supporting a disgraced rogue on his rehabilitation tour ...

...As Michael Pezzullo points out in Inquirer this weekend, it is right that Australians mourn the sacrifice and tragedy of war on Anzac Day, but we should not pretend that total war is an abstract or distant phenomenon. “For Australia’s part,” he writes, “we are not doing nearly enough to prepare for the possibility of a war in the Pacific in the near term. Even if we judge that likelihood to be a 10 per cent chance, we need to be doing more now to get to a war footing. Having placed our bet on the noble cause of peace (‘war has to be avoided at all costs’), we will not be ready in time to defend ourselves if a war were to break out in the Pacific.”

Mr Pezzullo asks: Do we have the fortitude to calculate the odds of war and prepare accordingly? Most Australians will be well accustomed to hearing that we live in the most threatening strategic circumstances since the end of World War II. Yet our neglect of defence and our failure to adapt to a new era of asymmetric warfare suggest both an entrenched attitude of entitlement and a complacency to the stark realities we face.

The legend has never been short of detractors; they have come and gone through the years, but Anzac Day has outlasted them all. The date endures because it proves that courage and dignity ultimately rest with ordinary people. Still, Saturday’s commemoration must do more than merely console; it should also warn. In these dangerous times we must be willing to turn reverence into readiness.

What say you, Angelic one?

Lest we forget?

When I hear very young people today parroting jingoistic claptrap they have overheard about the original Anzacs “fighting for Australia”, I always think about those two, who fortunately survived to realise the error of joining in 1915. I also think about them when I hear failed politicians, commentators and other armchair warriors wanting “boots on the ground” for yet another failed enterprise on the other side of the world – just as futile as that war that was supposed to end all wars.

Amen to that ...

It must have been a bug the pond picked up attending that funeral mass ...

And so to end on lies, all lies, and the tragedy of women caught between mad King Donald and the mad Mullahs ...

Is there any real difference in their love of the killing fields? Trump Administration Wants To Fast-Track Executions With Electrocution, Firing Squads, Lethal Gas

An odd day for the reptiles to revert to being the Australian Daily Zionist News, but the bromancer and the dog botherer show the way ...

It's been a long time since the pond mentioned John Birmingham, but the pond just has to start off this weekend by noting his substack offering, So, you've decided to write a terrible EV piece.

Birmingham is clearly a member of the EV cult, and knows whereof he writes, and his opening flourish establishes the tone ...

So, something different this week. I got angry, but this time on a Tuesday. Why? Because the ABC’s 7:30 Report decided to cosplay as The Daily Telegraph on the topic of EV’s.
Unsurprisingly there’s a lot of interest in electric vehicles at the moment, so even less surprisingly both old and new media channels are flooding the zone with clickable shit. And some of the worst, most deplorable shit has been at Ninefax and the ABC.

Well yes, but as the pond gave up the 7.30 Report long ago, the pond only finds stuff out when someone turns up in the pond's in box to explain that Ethiopia is more technologically sophisticated than the ABC ...(Much like the venerable Meade's essential service).

And so to the reptiles this day, and what a relief.

Some correspondents have been worried about the bromancer's mental state, but this day he reverted to form, rediscovered his inner Zionist, and scribbled a lengthy five minute piece worthy of the Australian Daily Zionist News.

The header: Israel and Lebanon: two victims of Iran and its proxies; Lebanon is as big a victim of Hezbollah as Israel. Both are attempting to free themselves of its deadly influence, as the Trump-brokered ceasefire indicates.

The caption: Southern Lebanon becomes a frontline in a wider Iran-Israel conflict. Picture: AFP

In this bromancer telling, mad King Donald isn't demented, he's a cheesemaker, and in the eyes of the bromancer, blessed are the cheesemakers... especially as it's all about the persecution of Xians ...

In the hours leading to Donald Trump’s White House declaration of a three-week extension of the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, Hezbollah terrorists launched a volley of rockets into northern Israel, trying to kill the ceasefire.
The Israel-Lebanon equation is a hinge of the Iran conflict, if not of global history.
Trump oversaw negotiations between Israeli and Lebanese officials and promises now to convene a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun. Trump says Iran ending support for Hezbollah is a condition of any long-term peace.
The two nations that will suffer innocent and grievous damage from this conflict are two that by history and culture should be natural partners, Israel and Lebanon.
That’s counterintuitive. Israel seems to be winning. But the evil dynamics of terror and antisemitic hatred, as practised by Iran and its proxies, and amplified by the wretched alliance of the Western left with the Islamists, offer a disturbing prognosis for Israel.

Ah the perfidious left. 

Those wretches who dare note what's currently going down in Gaza and the West Bank, and assorted outrages will have to cop a lot of bromancer rage this day ...

Though you might remember reading in Haaretz  A Settler Drive to Ethnically Cleanse Palestinians Is Underway in the West Bank. Israel's Security Apparatus Is Complicit, even a peep about this dismal business puts you in league with fundamentalist Islamics and mad Mullahs, and makes you anti-Semitic ...

Meanwhile, Lebanon is effectively subject to colonial occupation, not by Israel but by Iran through Hezbollah.
That’s why a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon could be destroyed by Iran acting through Hezbollah.
Israel and Lebanon should be brothers. Both host civilisations that are central to the entire Western tradition. Israel is the only Jewish state. Christianity, human rights, everything we like about civilisation proceeds in part from the Jewish heritage. Lebanon has been an essential Christian community since the first century AD. It was crucial in the history of Christianity, and the Maronite and Orthodox Lebanese Christians form, with Egyptian Copts, one of the last sizeable Christian communities in the Middle East.
The effective Middle East purge of Christianity in recent decades, which followed the Middle East purge of most Jews in the years after World War II, has seen millions of Lebanese Christians emigrate, many to Australia, and we’re immensely lucky to have them.
Once, Lebanon was a majority Christian nation; Christians are now a (large) minority. Israel, which practices religious freedom, is one of few Middle East nations where the Christian population is growing.
Official Iranian identity is fuelled by antisemitic conviction and it exaggerates these sentiments in the proxies it sponsors. There was briefly an Israel Lebanon peace treaty in the early 1980s. The Lebanese politician seen as its sponsor, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated and it never came into force. Although Lebanon is historically a nation of magnificent cultural richness, in modern times it has been ravaged by rapacious neighbours, first Syria, now Iran.

Will the bromancer at any point slip in a quiet word about the dismal treatment of Palestinians, settler violence, and the ethnic cleansing that has been a marker for the current far right government of Israel? Don't get too excited ...

For a period in the 70s and 80s, the Palestine Liberation Organisation was headquartered in southern Lebanon. The PLO launched repeated terrorist attacks on Israeli towns and villages, often targeting children and other civilians. To prevent this, the Israelis finally invaded Lebanon and set up a secure zone from the border to the Litani River. They empowered and allied with the South Lebanon Army, which was officially secular but mostly Christian. The SLA was the only Arab military force that ever fought for Israel’s security.
It allied with Israel not only out of self-interest but from a conviction that Israel was the nearest to its own values and civilisational ideals. When Israel abruptly withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, the SLA was betrayed. Thousands of its members settled in Israel, others surrendered to Lebanese forces.
Hezbollah was from the start an extremist Shia Islamist group funded and supported by Iran. It claimed victory in Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, and at the direction of Iran has conducted deadly terrorism against Israel ever since. Hezbollah has no loyalty to Lebanon or consideration for the Lebanese people.
I have spent some time in northern Israel. Once I visited a Jewish retirement home on the Israel-Lebanon border. Looking into a Lebanese valley, I saw many flags flying. None showed the haunting cedar of the flag of Lebanon. All were Hezbollah flags.
After the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran eight weeks ago, it took only a few days for Hezbollah to begin a barrage of rocket, artillery and drone fire into northern Israel. This action had nothing to do with any Lebanese interest. It was entirely at the direction of Iran to mobilise another front in Iran’s endless war against Israel. Hezbollah knew this would force Israeli action.
Veteran Israeli journalist and strategic analyst Ehud Yaari tells me: “Virtually everywhere in Israel north of Haifa people were running into bomb shelters or safe rooms seven, eight, 10 times a day. There was a constant stream of rockets from Hezbollah.”
The Hezbollah attacks have to be seen as part of Iran’s long-run strategy.
The Hamas terror atrocity against Israel in October 2023, among the most sadistic, savage and barbaric actions the world has ever seen, were designed in part to prevent the imminent normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In that, sadly, they were successful.

Has the bromancer supped deep on the Netanyahu kool aid? You betcha ...

Netanyahu once told me his long-term peace strategy with the Palestinians was an “outside in” approach. Israel would normalise relations with its Arab neighbours first and this would encourage Palestinians to accept a reasonable modus vivendi with Israel.
It’s a central fact that Israel has several times offered the Palestinians a state on almost all of the West Bank, all of Gaza and compensating territory from Israel proper, but the Palestinian leadership never accepted peace with Israel. Iran’s strategy was to use its proxies to prevent Israel from settling into a normal life, prevent peace treaties with Israel’s neighbours, and gradually exhaust Israel’s morale and even its military.
Thus relentless mortar and rocket attacks from Gaza made life difficult for southern Israeli towns; sporadically, something similar could be achieved by terror groups within the West Bank, and Hezbollah could constantly harass northern parts of Israel.
Here is where Western critics of Israel are so wrong and dishonest.

So it's wrong and dishonest to note the ethnic cleansing? Or perhaps the way that fatuous blather about natural alliances muddies the waters?

Bad optics? Israel jails soldiers who smashed Jesus statue in Lebanon
Critics say Israeli attacks on Christian sites challenge claims of a Judeo-Christian shared heritage and mutual respect.

...Christian holidays, specifically those around the time of Easter, have become particular sources of tension, the report noted, with priests and nuns wearing visible Christian clothing in West Jerusalem and occupied East Jerusalem facing the risk of harassment every time they enter public spaces.
“We’ve entered a period of what [Australian genocide studies scholar] Dirk Moses called ‘permanent security’, where anything different, anything that might be a threat, or could even be a threat in the future, has to be destroyed,“ prominent Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani told Al Jazeera.
That difference is inherent to the Christian faith.
“It’s not about left or right,” Shenhav-Shahrabani explained. “It even goes to language. In everyday Hebrew, people refer to Jesus as Yeshu, which is a curse word, rather than Yeshua, which is correct.”
“That’s commonplace. That’s how it’s used in everyday media,” he continued. “If that’s where you begin, it doesn’t matter if it’s stupidity or ignorance, it all leads to the same place.”

The pond never thought it would be mentioning Xians, but here we are.

Eventually the bromancer gets around to a minor billy goat butt ...

In isolation, Israel’s actions seem disproportionate. Sometimes I think they have been disproportionate.

But in the way of the bromancer, any minor billy goat butt is immediately followed by a huge butt ...

But you have to see the totality of the threat posed cumulatively by Hamas, terrorist groups in the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militia in Iraq, and previously the Syrian regime, as well as Iran’s previously huge missile stocks, to accurately judge the credible threat to which Israel is responding.
Netanyahu also once told me his reputation as a hawk and a hard man was a strategic asset for Israel. It meant Jerusalem didn’t have to take many actions because Middle East actors feared Netanyahu.
Now the Iranians and their proxies have forced Netanyahu to act decisively.
The non-Shia Lebanese population and many Lebanese Shi’ites, too, hate Hezbollah for embroiling them in endless conflict. In eight weeks Hezbollah has fired thousands of projectiles against Israel. The Lebanese government ordered Hezbollah to stop, ordered the Lebanese Army to disarm Hezbollah and expelled the Iranian ambassador.
What actually happened? Hezbollah refused to stop. The Lebanese Army said it couldn’t disarm them. The Iranian ambassador refused to leave. And Hezbollah has threatened a violent coup against the Lebanese government.
Now Israel plans to establish a security zone once more in southern Lebanon, about 6km to 8km from the Israeli border. This is necessary for anything approaching normal life to resume in northern Israel. To clear this area perhaps 800,000 Lebanese have been displaced, an immense tragedy to be laid wholly at the feet of Hezbollah and Iran.
The useful idiots of the Western left will gleefully portray this, entirely dishonestly, as Israeli “colonialism”, further undermining Israel in the West.
Islamic State is urging its followers to emulate the Bondi massacre of innocent Jews everywhere. Synagogues are attacked in London, as in Australia.
Israel and Lebanon are victims of Iran and of Hezbollah. But don’t expect to hear that much in Western societies which, insanely, are becoming themselves more anti-Israel and more antisemitic.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

And that's how it goes in the Australian Daily Zionist News. 

Any consideration of the fate of Gaza and the West Bank and Palestinians is immediately dismissed as anti-Semitic, and is always in support of the mad Mullahs ...

And yet the latest excursion has been a mad folly that has done nothing for Iranian people, nor for the United States, nor for the world, which will soon begin to discover what real shortages look like ...

The lizard Oz had lots more of this sort of blather, including but not limited to ...

Moral collapse on antisemitism finds grotesque expression
The Left’s moral collapse on antisemitism has found its most grotesque expression
If declaring a murdered child beyond the bounds of empathy does not cross the most basic human test, then what does?
By Nick Dyrenfurth

Contributor

Luckily the intermittent archive is currently working, and the pond personally supervised Nick being sent off to that dismal cornfield.

Ditto the pond decided this outing by Dame Slap could be consigned to the wasteland ...

Girlcotted: how Catharine Lumby was cancelled by her own movement
After decades of pioneering activism against sexual violence, one of Australia’s most respected feminists was deplatformed by the very community she helped build.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

At the nub of this yarn were tensions over Gaza and Israel, but this is what stopped the pond dead in its tracks ...

Over a glass of wine a few weeks back, Lumby laughed about our views getting closer and closer. I winked at her, saying that I was pretty certain her views were moving closer to mine. It was a joke, the kind friends – and colleagues – with different views ought to be able to make.
The fundamentalists on the Left don’t joke. They lop off your head.

If Lumby thinks that laughing and winking and joking and sharing plonk with Dame Slap is the way forward, then the long absent lord help her.

Dame Slap lops off heads at a rate and in a way that would make your average lefty go pale with fear, and she has a platform from which she can conduct her jihads.

While noting that Islamophobia is rampant this weekend, the pond also saw that the reptiles had plenty of room for transphobia...

EXCLUSIVE
Top psychiatrist suspended for opposing youth gender treatments
‘Take my treatment as a warning’: Psychiatrist suspended for opposing youth gender treatments
Psychiatrists pleaded with professional body to support outspoken colleague Andrew Amos, only to discover it had suspended him.
By Stephen Rice

The always boiling Rice seems to make transophobia his special EXCLUSIVE work.

Such was the obsessive compulsive nature of the reptiles' transphobia that the lizard Oz editorialist felt the need to join in the jihad, encouraging paranoia and a persecution complex (something many trans people know only too well)...

Psychiatrist’s unjust suspension
Practitioners and authorities around the world are becoming more sceptical about the prescription of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-distressed children and teenagers.
By Editorial

It almost made the pond yearn for a world where normal madness can flourish ...

And so to the dog botherer, also contributing to what - amazingly on Anzac Day - is a rag seemingly more intent on being The Australian Daily Zionist News than in dragging out the two up and the biscuits ...

The header: We’re complacent about risk of extremism at home, but we’re all targets too; We may not want to be at war but Islamist fanatics certainly are at war against us, as Islamic State’s latest call to action declares.

The caption: Chayim Klein, a member of the Jewish community, stands in the damaged area of Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue, holding a Sefer (holy book) that was there during the attack orchestrated by Iran. Picture: Arsineh Houspian

Did the pond mention paranoia and a persecution complex?

The barking mad dog botherer decided that the way to begin was to plunge Australia into war ...

This year we will commemorate Anzac Day under the pretence that we are not at war.

Actually we're not at war, and many other countries decided that they didn't want to have anything to do with a folly, an excursion, that will ensure the world's economy is in a state of chaos for months to come.

But the war mongering dog botherer will have none of that ...

Our government will continue to portray the current conflict in the Middle East as an unnecessary excursion by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and stress that our Wedgetail aircraft deployment to the United Arab Emirates is solely defensive, laughably justified as protection for our expats.
But while thousands gather at North Bondi for one of the nation’s most iconic dawn services, those at the southern reaches of the crowd will stand where bullets ricocheted just five months ago in an act, allegedly, of jihadist war. This is the same Islamist extremist threat being tackled in Iran by the US and Israel, one that is existential for Israel but pivotal for the rest of the world, including Australia.
Just to square the circle: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind the firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue 17 months ago, taking the Islamist extremist-inspired antisemitism in this country to an ugly nadir that tragically was surpassed a year later on the bloodied sands of Bondi.

Cue another snap designed to get the hive mind agitated ... The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was behind the firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue 17 months ago. Picture: NurPhoto via Getty Images

The dog botherer was determined to see the country at war ...

We do not want to be at war but the Islamist extremists, often inspired and funded by Iran, have fanatical certitude about their war against us.
That much of the population and most of our politicians fail to understand this or choose to ignore it only exacerbates our vulnerability. Time and again we fail to learn the lessons.
For more than two years there were many people in public debate warning about the rising tide of Islamist extremism and antisemitism in the wake of the October 7 atrocities in Israel. Australian Jewish community leaders took their warnings and appeals directly to governments.
Politicians and authorities paid lip service to the problem, tangled themselves in false equivalence about Islamophobia for fear of offending Muslim communities and did not do enough. The Bondi massacre was shocking yet seemed inevitable – we will never know if, without this national indolence, it might have been prevented.
Yet even now, after 15 funerals and untold trauma, our leaders and authorities slink back into complacency. They avert their eyes and wash their hands, yet will express shock and surprise, no doubt, the next time we see an Islamist terrorist attack.

And what of Gaza, and what of the atrocities on both sides? Crickets ... Many locals attending Bondi Beach pay their respects at a makeshift memorial to the victims of December's terror attack. Picture: NewsLocal

There aren't many upsides in having a federal Labor government, but surely one of them is that it avoided getting the country involved in the current folly. 

If the liar from the Shire had been in charge, or the mad monk, likely we'd have been off on the crusade, with the Murdoch press clamouring for war, and assorted crusaders of the dog botherer kind demanding that we get involved ...(while staying safe in their Surry Hills bunker) ...

A public forum is booked in a Sydney City Council building next month to discuss “Why it’s right to globalise the intifada”. This phrase is a blatant call for violence against Israel and Jews.
During two waves of intifada in the early 1990s and then from 2000 thousands of innocent Israelis were killed in suicide bombings and other random attacks, and thousands of Palestinians were killed in efforts to quell the violence. Some have dubbed Hamas’s murderous rampage in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, as the third intifada. Anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters were at Bondi Beach in September last year chanting for intifada. “Long live the intifada!” they shouted on the sand, punching the air, “Intifada, intifada!”
Three months later, 100m away, dozens of people were gunned down and 15 were killed. There it was, intifada globalised.
The chant to globalise the intifada is now illegal in Queensland and a parliamentary committee has recommended the same for NSW. The phrase could be a breach of the law already as an incitement to violence, but no police authority or prosecutor’s office has been willing to try.
The official complicity is astounding. Imagine how quickly authorities would act if groups were publicly calling for deadly violence against gays, Indigenous communities, Catholics or any other ethnic group or religion.
Jews are expected to accept this. Accept they can never live in peace and security, even in Australia.
Politicians will not even utter the word Islamist extremism (even though it is the central problem and main threat), preferring the catch-all term of antisemitism, lest they put off-side any sensitive members of Muslim communities. Yet Jewish Australians gather at schools and synagogues in suburban Sydney with armed guards, police patrols and cement barricades hastily installed by governments after Bondi.

Once again, any thought of the fate of Palestinians and Gaza is rounded up, and pressed into the crusader cause, Pro Palestine protests continue in Melbourne after the US and Israel attacked Iran. Picture: Josie Hayden

Is it possible to note that bad things are being done on both sides?

Per Haaretz ...

Dozens of Israeli settlers storm West Bank village, clash with residents and torch vehicle
Dozens of Israeli settlers entered the West Bank village of Qusra, south of Nablus, where they threw stones at local residents and later set fire to a construction machine during their withdrawal, according to Palestinian reports on Friday.

Are there any signs of hope?

'Swimming Against the Tide, but Swimming': More Israelis and Palestinians Now Choose to Grieve Together

...More Israelis are also joining, especially to do protective presence work: to act as human shields for Palestinians amid rising settler violence in the West Bank. For many Palestinians, this is a very surprising experience, Salman says. Young people in the West Bank today "haven't seen anything except separation walls, checkpoints and settler violence," which makes it difficult for them to picture an alternative, she says.
"What they know about the other is either like an Israeli soldier with a uniform and a gun, or a violent settler burning their villages and their cars and harming their fields and animals. So when they meet activists, especially on the ground, at protests and [providing a protective presence] at the olive harvest, they see something completely different. They have really interesting conversations, and it's important to learn about the other's narrative, because it's not something we learn at school."

Up against the fundamentalist madness on both sides, it's really just a drop in the ocean of hate, but it's still better than the dog botherer's war mongering ...

This is the protection they get from governments that are too timid to tackle the actual menace. Search all you like for moral equivalence, but you will find no other community in this country forced to live like this. Schoolchildren and congregations behind vehicle-proof barriers while mobs chant “globalise the intifada” at will. This, apparently, is peace for Australians who are Jewish.
Australia should, of course, be supporting the US and Israel in their war against Iran. We rejected a US request for naval assistance to protect shipping three years ago, and while we received no request before this war the government had already made its disdain known.
Anthony Albanese broke with Israel and the US in the UN and recognised a non-existent Palestinian state. In recent days he has been more critical of the US President than he has of the Islamist theocrats who run a murderous, misogynistic, antisemitic and terror-sponsoring regime in Tehran.
“We support very much the declaration that Iran couldn’t be allowed to get a nuclear weapon,” the Prime Minister said on Thursday. “What we have called for is for de-escalation. We’ve been critical and have called out some of the statements that have been made. It’s not appropriate or acceptable to say that you’re going to destroy a civilisation. And so, we’ve done that. We are allies with the United States, but that doesn’t mean that we’re automatically participants in any conflict and we haven’t been.”
He criticises Trump rather than the extremist Iranian leadership and suggests he would like Tehran to give up its nuclear weapons program but has no alternative plan as to how. Astonishingly, Albanese told a podcast that Barack Obama’s Iran deal was successful – this was the sellout that funnelled billions of dollars into Tehran while the mullahs pursued their nuclear weapons and missile programs with impunity.

And there you have it. If the dog botherer and Benji have their way, there never will be a Palestinian state, and the system of apartheid that currently prevails will be in place from the river to the sea ... The 15 innocent lives lost at Bondi should remind us to be vigilant. Picture: Monique Harmer

This is exactly why the middle east is stuffed. A middle aged man baying for blood in the Australian Daily Zionist News isn't going to sort things out, or be of any help ...

Australians would do well to accept that this is our war because we are its targets – as we saw at the Adass Israel Synagogue and at Bondi. Just because we are too weak to join the US and Israel militarily, or even diplomatically, it will not protect us from terrorists.
They target us for who we are. Strong kafirs or weak kafirs, it makes little difference.
Islamic State let it be known this week that the Bondi attack was just one “pebble from a mountain” and it would keep killing until we “grow weary of burying the dead”. And it made clear that any non-Muslim is a legitimate target.
Pretending the war in Iran is Israel’s or America’s alone, or trying to convince people the singular threat at home is for the Jewish community, is not only morally bankrupt but also intellectually feeble and strategically blind.
Defeating Islamist extremism and the main sponsor of global terrorism is an imperative for any person or country that can be targeted. This means it is a fight for all of us.
Four months before the original Anzac landing, two men believed they had a holy duty to take up arms against innocent Australians, attacking a train taking families to a New Year’s Day picnic out of Broken Hill. Children of my generation were taught that Mulla Abdullah and Gool Mahomed were Turks who decided to fight their adopted country because Australia and Turkey were at war in Europe.
In fact, they were fanaticised Muslims from South Asia who accepted the call to jihad against a nation fighting the Ottoman Empire abroad. The pair fired at picnickers killing three men and a 17-year-old girl before they were hunted down and killed.
The unsuspecting people on that train knew Australia was at war but believed they were a long way from any threat.
Many Australians today, including our national leadership, labour under the misapprehension that what is happening in the Middle East is someone else’s war, averting their eyes from a clear and present danger at home.

The clear and present danger at home? 

The pond, for its sins, reads the lizard Oz daily and is reminded of what a clear and present danger these reptiles are when it comes to peace, the economy and the sustainability of the planet ...

They're part of a supine mob that now lines up to lie down and be bullied by a sundowner in the grip of dementia ...

And so to end with rants of a more congenial kind ...

In which Our Henry nails the spirit of the season with the help of Thucydides, and sundry other reptiles struggle to match the master's insights...

 

Steady, steady. No pushing or shoving. Please form a line and keep the line moving.

There will be no distractions or deviations. The pond will put on hold celebrations of the big loan to Ukraine. The pond will defer consideration of the desire of the pasty Hastie to kiss the ring of mad King Donald.

The pond will avoid contemplating the journalist murdering, Christ statue bashing, settler killing fields and the ethnic cleansing of the current government of Israel.

Sure the pond would like to spend time with MAGA Navy Boss Spreads Unhinged Theories About Witches and Cannibalism, but the pond has long known that ever since Salem a secret cabal of witches has ruled America. Hillary! Teleporting Waffle Houses!

And the pond pond promises not provide any nuze you can uze on the strait of Hormuz, not even a list of the many goods that you will not be able to uze or which will face price abuze as the mad King holds the world's economy to ransom (Condoms! Plastic storage boxes!).

Instead the pond will plunge straight into the good oil, the drum, that will amuze, straight from the horse's mouth by way of the lizard Oz's best and brightest muze.

You see, it's the season, and Our Henry is right on it ...

The header: Do we, as Australians, merit the sacrifice of those first Anzacs? The Dawn Service’s ritual centre, with its ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old’ speaks of the living’s relation to the dead.

The caption for the fiery snap: A Dawn Service at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance.

The pond realises some will be disappointed. After that build up, it's just Our Henry, ancient warrior war monger, performing the seasonal ritual and taking five minutes about it?

What about the actual realities of the war currently unfolding? What about some Italians wanting to act as scabs and score a place in the World Cup by subterfuge rather than winning on the field?

Pshaw, the pond says.

This is prime Henry. The pond guarantees there will be time spent in ancient Greece! There will be confirmed sightings of Thucydides!

There will be a full parade by the pompous pedant of a range of portentous references, as solemn as the French Foreign Legion doing a slow march in wobble mode, hands pointed down, beards jutting, axes draped over aprons.

Please, allow Our Henry to gush, and what a sweeting blessing, without a single reptile visual distraction: 

At dawn in the high summer of 413BC, when the Peloponnesian War was in its 18th year, two trophies faced each other across the narrow strait at the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf. The day before, a Corinthian fleet had met an Athenian squadron and for the first time had struck the Athenians more forcefully than they could strike back.
The Corinthians knew the Athenians’ larger fleet and masterly seamanship gave them a crushing advantage. To counter it, they modified their ships’ prows, making them shorter and stouter to withstand ramming. Having neutralised their adversaries’ superiority by departing from the conventional Greek ship design, they raised their victory trophy at Erineus on the Achaean shore.
But despite extensive damage, the Athenians held the water at the fighting’s end, recovered the wrecks and the dead and, according to traditional standards, were the victors. In the hours that followed, they rowed across the Gulf and planted a counter-trophy at Molycrian Rhion, on the Aetolian side.
By the early morning light the two trophies therefore came clearly into view only three kilometres apart. Longstanding rules, that awarded victory to one side or the other, had been breached; but it was something far deeper that lay broken at Erineus.

Are you not amuzed?

Did the pond not guarantee a fine old time? Can it get any better? Of course it can. Let there be Nazis, because they are not just the remit of Mark Felton or SBS. Our Henry likes to take them on his cruze:

German intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg – who had experienced the rise of Nazism – put it best. Human beings, he argued, are constitutionally incapable of living in unfiltered contact with reality, exposed to the overwhelming, undifferentiated threat of a world that offers no given orientation, no protection. We therefore connect ourselves to it through the mediating tissue of myth and ritual, metaphor and story.
These do not give us access to the world as it is; they render it intelligible by investing events with significance and placing them within a widely understood frame. And what makes a society viable is sufficient overlap between its members’ mental maps to allow them to manage their differences.

And now for what correspondents always lust after, are always panting for in eager anticipation. Thucydides!

When the common repertoire of memories, symbols and words breaks down, that connective tissue is not merely strained; it is torn apart. The result is what Thucydides called stasis: a condition in which conflict can no longer be contained by the civic order, driving society towards rupture.
The war, as Erineus revealed, had shredded the Greek world’s shared frame of significance – undermining ritual, dissolving trust and corroding alliances once deemed secure.
However, the process ran not only between poleis but within them. And nowhere was the descent into stasis more disastrous than in Thucydides’ beloved Athens.
Against stasis, Athens had, at the war’s outset, one extraordinary bulwark: the city as Pericles had taught his generation to see it. What distinguished the Athenians, Pericles said in the Funeral Oration, was that they loved life and lived it fully, yet were ready to die for their city, precisely because the city gave them so much.
But claiming love of, and loyalty to, the city was easy when both were without cost. Once the plague descended on Athens in 430BC, bringing sudden and unpredictable death, Athenians began to live for the moment, placing present appetite above future concerns.
Soon after, with Pericles dying while the plague raged, his demagogic successors devoted their specious rhetoric to inflaming division rather than fostering collective purpose.
It was, however, the war that consummated the rupture into opposing camps. “War,” Thucydides writes, “filches away the easy provision of the everyday.” The civic decencies proved dependent on peace and plenty; when citizens were forced to bear even the slightest hardship, the thinness of the civic compact was exposed.
By then, dialogue had collapsed and the factions were hermetically enclosed in their own myths, entrenching the hatreds between them. The war had come home. It was only a matter of time before external enemies administered the coup de grace to a body that had already lost its capacity to cohere. Thucydides’ formula is terse: the Athenians did not succumb to Sparta; they succumbed to one another.
Thucydides, with what Nietzsche praised as his “courage in the face of reality”, diagnosed the disease as its victim lay dying. But he did far more than that. His History is itself a compensatory act of significance-making in the face of significance’s dissolution.

Incroyable. Nietzsche as a bonus! 

And wait, yet more Thucydides, with a fine example of Our Henry speaking in ancient tongues:

By giving the war a shape, a language, a set of themes that still organise political thought, Thucydides produced a “ktêma es aiei”, a possession for all time. He wrote, he tells us, so that future men, when they see similar tragedies looming – and the nature of human affairs makes their recurrence inevitable – may recognise the risks and act accordingly.
Two and a half millennia later, his warning resonates. Once again, we are in a war marred not only by the clash of arms but by a cacophony of contradictory claims.
War, by its nature, shrouds gains and losses in secrecy, deception and misrepresentation. Worse still, assessments of its likely course are vitiated by the inherent unpredictability of action and reaction: what Thucydides called “to astathmëton” – the irreducible contingency of a world that can be acted upon but never fully mastered.
But despite those factors, which urge caution, there is an extraordinary rush to judgment, pronouncing outcomes, and anointing victors, before they are decided. And no less extraordinary is the vehemence with which opposing views are held, assigning all success (and tactical shrewdness) to one side and all failure (and strategic folly) to the other.

And so at last to the modern world, and a little both siderism worthy of the New York Times:

The barely disguised schadenfreude of Donald Trump’s haters, and the matching ire of his supporters, are, no doubt, part of the explanation. 

Oh no doubt, no doubt. 

Is the man not in perfect balance, is there not an appealing symmetry to this presentation?

And now let us draw together the threads, so that the entire meaning of the season is unveiled, in a way that was only hinted at in that service in the Yabba in Wake in Fright:

They are, however, symptoms rather than causes, visible manifestations of the stasis Thucydides acutely analysed: the withering, here as throughout the West, of the common repertoire of values and practices through which contending arguments can be advanced, differences addressed, tensions however imperfectly contained.
And yet the crowds at the Anzac Day dawn service – one of the few occasions on which Australians still gather the frayed threads of historical significance – show the longing for a shared framework of meaning persists.
Inaugurated in another time of bitter division, after the searing antagonisms of the conscription referendums, the dawn service’s ritual centre, with its “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old”, says nothing of the dead’s relation to eternity; it speaks instead of the living’s relation to the dead, conferring enduring meaning on events that unfolded more than a century ago in war’s all-enveloping fog.
The Last Post is sounded into the dark; the silence is kept; the Rouse follows as the sky begins to brighten. Between the two lies a held breath in which the nation briefly becomes, once more, a community.
That is a pause, not a cure. But if, in those few moments, we can resolve to remember not only the fallen but the achievements, now so often derided, of the nation for which they fought and died; to refuse the continued perversion of truth and the escalation of hatred; and to renew the capacity – when the reckoning comes, as it will – to stand-to at dawn beside those who stand with us, then this will be a country that has merited their sacrifice.

The pond does believe this is one of the finest of the hole in bucket repair man's outings in recent times, a vintage excursion in to the meaning of war.

The pond didn't think anyone could match JD explaining Catholicism to the Pope ...

... but Our Henry has surpassed him!

It's a tough act to follow. Some might want to venture into a reptile EXCLUSIVE.

The best the pond could do was to send it to the intermittent archive ...

EXCLUSIVE
Cell to cenotaph: Roberts-Smith vows to take part in Anzac Day commemorations
Australia’s most-decorated soldier backs accused war criminal and fellow Victoria Cross recipient’s right to march, insisting ‘what happens in war, stays in war’.
By Jamie Walker

What happens in war stays in war? 

What a tremendous variation on what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

If only the Nazis had that legal defence in the Nuremberg trials, they could have walked out of prison free and proud warriors, and Our Henry would have been stripped of a valuable reference. 

I say, old chaps, we might have done a few beastly things to the Jews, but the Jews are being beastly to the Palestinians, and remember the old adage, what happens in war stays in war. (And the reptiles at the lizard Oz will write it up for the delectation of the hive mind).

And for more in the same area, some might want to contemplate the meretricious Merritt, helping out with ...

Australia’s civil justice system is on the brink of an uncivil war
Soldiers’ cases expose critical weaknesses in Australian law
In return for passing up their right to silence, four soldiers were promised their evidence would not be used against them in the future.
By Chris Merritt
Legal Affairs Contributor

The pond personally supervised that listing in the intermittent archive and trusts that it holds good for at least this day ...

And then there was an old digger trying to compete on Our Henry's sacred turf ...

The Ode tells of true significance of Anzac Eve
We instinctively understand the power of the eve – the quiet moments before momentous days. Anzac Eve deserves such a place.
By Peter Cosgrove

But how could he possibly match the hole in bucket man? 

And besides, after that surfeit of Henry served in such spiffing style, the pond has had a surfeit of the spirit of the season for the moment ... so the pond carefully supervised its placement in the intermittent archive, pausing only for a celebratory 'toon.

And what about this shocking piece? 

The pond has heard many rogue opinions in its day, but a reptile suggesting that we need to follow China's lead in anything is absolutely outrageous, entirely beyond the pale ...

We need to follow China’s lead on regulation of AI - ChatGPT has huge responsiblities (sic, AI checked and approved) that it is choosing to ignore
By Toby Walsh

Chatbots in the US have been linked to self harm. In one case, it is claimed that ChatGPT even offered to write the suicide note.

The pond did wake this morning to rather old news regarding AI spreading the word on a fake disease, which was written up in Nature:

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?

Got sore, itchy eyes? You’re probably one of the millions of people who spend too much time staring at screens, being bombarded with blue light. Rub your eyes too much and your eyelids might turn a slight, pinkish hue.
So far, so normal. But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have got an odd answer: bixonimania.
The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.
The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.
Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers ...

And so on, and in that spirit the pond made sure that Prof Walsh's piece was saved to the intermittent archive, and will offer a teaser trailer, even if it involves the reprehensible concept of following China's lead ...

But even though the pond shares the prof's fears about AI and has more than a fair amount of contempt for Sam, the pond believes that nothing can match the experience of that noble Our Henry reading.

After experiencing it, the pond almost felt a Macbethian moment come upon it...

I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have, but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath
Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.

Put it another way ...

Picking itself up from that trough of despond and confusion, the pond allowed itself one last outing. 

How could the pond avoid Mein Gott and his hearty renewables bashing ways?

He was sure to confuze the greenie foolz ...

Not for him a desire to return to the lying rodent and Petey boy days. 

Here was a reptile who can embrace the spirit of the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, here was a reptile who could deliver good nuze, despite whatever was happening in the strait of Hormuz ...

What a stunning opening, and what contrasting snaps.

There was the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way looking vigorous and angry, while Satan's little helper looked at best bemused, and at worst completely bewildered, lips pursed like a carnival clown making ready to receive a ping pong ball.

The world weary Mein Gott continued on, in a way he has done many times before ...

As I have written many times, our nation has tremendous potential to use the photosynthesis process to profitably absorb carbon emissions. Bowen also now understands that we are going to need a lot of gas and he opens the way to link gas development with housing timber and agricultural carbon storage. As I pointed out in 2022, saltbush and similar plants can slash global carbon emissions and become a major source of world protein to relieve world food shortages. Carbon is stored in the root systems.
In the process, Australia has the potential to be a Middle East in reverse.
Bowen also understands the need for Australia to make its own nitrogenous fertilisers and, as my readers are well aware, we have the technology to extract oil and carbon from Victorian brown coal and use the carbon to make nitrogenous fertilisers.
We could start almost immediately but the Victorian government leaves diesel and fertiliser to Albo. The government and opposition need to consider combining to declare Victoria a state of sovereign risk.
But Bowen has not yet come to grips with the fact that while our solar-wind generation and transmission operation made sense a decade ago, the incredible cost blow-out now will set our nation back many decades. The rapid changes looming in technology already make it look obsolete. Maybe one day Bowen will change his mind.
That’s what Angus Taylor has done.
In a wonderful industry address he said: “Building tens of thousands of kilometres of power lines to nowhere, frankly, right now, is not what we need. It is only going to make the energy system more expensive and is going to drag down the government budget.”
I can’t think of anything more truthful than those Taylor words, and it provides real hope for the nation that he is prepared to make a stand in the national interest.
But telling the truth in this situation is very dangerous for Angus Taylor.

We'll all be rooned. It's not just Dame Groan who knows how to recite that poem, as the reptiles interrupted with a happy snap ... A politician confessing a mistake is such a rare event in Australia that it will send the environmentally friendly media into a frenzy. Picture: NewsWire / John Gass

How Mein Gott loves the positive role that Barners, Tamworth's ineradicable shame, plays in this conversation ...

When he was energy minister and Scott Morrison was prime minister, he undertook a memorandum of understanding with the NSW government which was designed to foster massive solar and wind generation plus transmission projects that he now says are “only going to make the energy system more expensive”.
Worse still, the regulator suggested that transmission towers near Riverina farmland should be limited to 330kV.
Taylor played a role in increasing capacity to 500kV, so increasing the height of the towers and their damage to Australian agriculture. This spread to other areas.
In hindsight he clearly made a fundamental mistake but to be fair, at that time, politicians on both sides were being told by cost estimators that the project would be economic because the cost was low.
We are now looking at the vicinity of $400bn capital outlay plus secret financing deals which will take the cost close to $1 trillion spread over 35 years.
That totally changes the game, particularly as all the signs are that we can reduce emissions at a fraction of the cost.
A politician confessing a mistake is such a rare event in Australia that it will send the environmentally friendly media into a frenzy but will highlight to the community the amount that will be needed to be raised via higher power prices to fund this disastrous project.
And on the wings is, of course, One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce.

Go Barners ... why, the reptiles will even give you an EXPLAINER AV distraction, The former political foes have joined force, Greg Brown reports.

And so to the wrap up ...

Barnaby would of course like to talk about the cost, but my guess is that he can smell a scandal in the secret funding. Many of the developers knew that the whole plan was uneconomic and were reluctant to proceed without guaranteed high rates of return. That is why it had to be kept secret. Barnaby will do his job and relentlessly work to uncover the finance scandal secrets.
And the discovery that Angus Taylor is now publicly contradicting his former stance as energy minister will send Barnaby into a frenzy of joy. My advice to Angus Taylor is to get in first.
As a nation Australia is being fundamentally changed by the Iran war which underlines our isolation and dependence on others. We have major projects in energy and defence that will require large sums of money and if we saddle these new enterprises with much higher power prices along with a $1 trillion community bill over 35 years our nation will be in a very dangerous situation.
We now have the Liberals, the Nationals and One Nation who all understand the folly of what is taking place and there must be genuine politicians in the ALP who will bring the subject up with Anthony Albanese.
Already the Prime Minister has prevented two mistakes by the Treasurer – the tax on unrealised gains and the extra tax on gas which would have reduced our supplies of diesel, aviation fuel and petrol. Now he has to bring his energy minister into line with the national interest.

The world's energy issues solved in a trice, thanks to Mein Gott and Australia as the new middle east, with due credit to Barners and prime Angus.

And you thought you were over the nuze that would amuze.

At last have it pasty Hastie ...

The Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie says doubling down on the US relationship has eroded Australia’s sovereign capability, including its defence industry, as he warns the country must “get serious” about national security to rebalance the alliance.
In a speech to the Robert Menzies Institute in Melbourne last night, the shadow minister for industry and sovereign capability said the reliance on the US meant “strategic trade-offs” that had hastened the deindustrialisation of Australia and “weakened our hard power”.
He said it had cost Australia “sovereign capabilities like a robust defence industry” and “strategic freedom of action” in ways that were now becoming clear amid the Middle East war.
Hastie said under Donald Trump the US “should not be expected to guarantee much except its own strategic interests”, which meant Australia must “get serious about our own national security” by rebuilding its industrial base and a defence force “with teeth”.
To put it bluntly, if Anzus is going to continue for another 75 years, we need to invest in our industrial base and our defence force.
The former soldier has been an outspoken critic of Trump and his war in Iran, striking a different tone to the opposition leader, Angus Taylor

What could possibly go wrong?

And so to an aside, with the transcript here ...Penn & Teller & the Supreme Court & BS