The pond is open to welcoming any apostate, deserter, turncoat, recidivist, renegade or backslider into the camp.
Bill Kristol, for example, has done a full 180°doughnut ...
There he was yesterday in The Bulwark mounting a full assault on King Donald and his war...
"Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that any one who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. . . . Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance."
If only Trump had read this paragraph before launching his hubristic war. If only Pete Hegseth had read it before boasting about our inevitable success. I suppose it’s out of the question that either would have done so. But is it out of the question to look forward to a day when we will once again have leaders who might not only know the name Churchill, but have learned from him?
No mention of Churchill's delirious desire to hang on to empire and India, or Gallipoli for that matter, but the pond is all for international laura n'order. (And speaking of weirdos, you can also get Andrew Egger doing over weirdo Joe Kent at the same link).
All good fun, so is it wrong to recall the Kristol of another era?
Here's David Corn in WaPo ...
How else to read his piece for Outlook on Sunday, in which he declared, "George W. Bush's presidency will probably be a successful one"? Surely Kristol, the No. 1 cheerleader for the Iraq war, was mocking himself (and his neoconservative pals) for having been so mistaken about so much. But just in case his article was meant to be a serious stab at commentary, let's review Kristol's record as a prognosticator.
On Sept. 18, 2002, he declared that a war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East." A day later, he said Saddam Hussein was "past the finish line" in developing nuclear weapons. On Feb. 20, 2003, he said of Saddam: "He's got weapons of mass destruction.... Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world." On March 1, 2003 -- 18 days before the invasion of Iraq -- Kristol dismissed the possibility of sectarian conflict afterward. He also said, "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president." He maintained that the war would cost $100 billion to $200 billion. (The running tab is now about half a trillion dollars.) On March 5, 2003, Kristol said, "We'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction."
And so on, and for those who want the links, here's Bill burbling away in WaPo about the wonders of George W.
Sadly the link to Corn doing over Kristol in his blog for The Nation no longer works, but it can be found on the Wayback Machine as Kristol Clear at Time...
On September 11, 2002, as the Bush administration began its sales campaign for the coming war, Kristol suggested that Saddam Hussein could do more harm to the United States than al Qaeda had: “we cannot afford to let Saddam Hussein inflict a worse 9/11 on us in the future.”
On September 15, 2002, he claimed that inspection and containment could not work with Saddam: “No one believes the inspections can work.” Actually, UN inspectors believed they could work. So, too, did about half of congressional Democrats. They were right.
On September 18, 2002, Kristol opined that a war in Iraq “could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.”
On September 19, 2002, he once again pooh-poohed inspections: “We should not fool ourselves by believing that inspections could make any difference at all.” During a debate with me on Fox News Channel, after I noted that the goal of inspections was to prevent Saddam from reaching “the finish line” in developing nuclear weapons, Kristol exclaimed, “He’s past that finish line. He’s past the finish line.”
On November 21, 2002, he maintained, “we can remove Saddam because that could start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy.”
On February 2, 2003, he claimed that Secretary of State Colin Powell at an upcoming UN speech would “show that there are loaded guns throughout Iraq” regarding weapons of mass destruction. As it turned out, everything in Powell’s speech was wrong. Kristol was uncritically echoing misleading information handed him by friends and allies within the Bush administration.
On February 20, 2003, he summed up the argument for war against Saddam: “He’s got weapons of mass destruction. At some point he will use them or give them to a terrorist group to use…Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world….France and Germany don’t have the courage to face up to the situation. That’s too bad. Most of Europe is with us. And I think we will be respected around the world for helping the people of Iraq to be liberated.”
On March 1, 2003, Kristol dismissed concerns that sectarian conflict might arise following a US invasion of Iraq: “We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they’ve never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together.” He also said, “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.” And he maintained that the war would be a bargain at $100 to $200 billion. The running tab is now nearing half a trillion dollars.
On March 5, 2003, Kristol said, “I think we’ll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq.”
Such vindication never came. Kristol was mistaken about the justification for the war, the costs of the war, the planning for the war, and the consequences of the war. That’s a lot for a pundit to miss. In his columns and statements about Iraq, Kristol displayed little judgment or expertise. He was not informing the public; he was whipping it. He turned his wishes into pronouncements and helped move the country to a mismanaged and misguided war that has claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. That’s not journalism.
And so on...
Should an atheist take any glee in the way some lost Opus Dei soul realises they were in the grip of a massive delusion?
Or in the way a Mormon might suddenly become aware, perhaps by watching the musical, that Christ didn't actually visit America?
That ancient Jews built boats and sailed
to America.
I am a Mormon.
And a Mormon just believes.
That plan involves
Me getting my own planet.
That Satan has a hold of you.
I believe!
That the Lord God has sent me here!
And I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people!!
That God lives on a planet called Kolob!
I believe!
That Jesus has his own planet as well.
And I believe
That the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri.
I believe the reptiles will have a change of heart, I believe the reptiles will do a Bill Kristol, I believe the reptile sinners and reprobates will be welcomed into the tribe, because who has not at some point been the victim of bizarre belief systems?
Foolish, foolish pond.
Just as the pond was hoping that the reptiles of Oz had suddenly come to a heavenly vision, they avoided the war altogether and opened with a celebration of the filthy rich ...
Coal lives! The destruction of the planet can continue unabated and the rich shall prosper and flourish!
The pond turned to Our Henry on a Friday, knowing that the obdurate old bull-headed bigot has never been for turning, has always stuck to a singular, most peculiar set of beliefs...
It was only fitting and proper for him to celebrate the many spectacular successes of the war.
Waddya kno, the cunning old fox buried his head in the sand, and took to blathering about something entirely different.
The header: Great mind warned us of threat of ‘neo-idiocy’ Philosopher Jurgen Habermas spent his life defending reasoned debate, but feared democracy was collapsing into noise and division.
The caption: Jurgen Habermas spent a lifetime defending reasoned debate as the foundation of democratic life. Picture: AFP
Others have noted Habermas - the Graudian here and here - but suddenly the pond found it stuck with Our Henry for an unholy five minutes while the world whirled on elsewhere...
Even worse, the reptiles decided that there would not be a single visual distraction:
The gap between the magnificence of his life’s work and the bleakness of its ultimate conclusion measures what has been lost. Not just a towering philosopher, but a fundamental conviction: that reason and politics could work together.
Habermas was that faith’s last great defender. Its core was simple. Democracy does not just need its formal structures; it needs citizens who know how to argue.
Not shout, not posture, but submit their views to the judgment of others and even change their minds. Habermas – born with a cleft palate, acutely alive to the power and purpose of speech – called this “the force of the better argument” and considered it the only legitimate basis of political power.
This was Western modernity’s great achievement: that when it is asked “why?”, authority must answer – with answers that withstand scrutiny. Authority could no longer rest on God or tradition. It could only rest on consent: reasoned, revisable, formed through public argument.
Having grown up under Nazism, one question haunted him: When authority can always be challenged, what prevents societies from disintegrating into chaos or falling prey to those who promise to end the argument?
Robust democratic institutions were clearly essential. But also vital was what he called a “public sphere”. It had emerged in the coffee houses of 18th-century London and Paris, where citizens argued about politics free of court and church. Over two centuries it grew into a dense network of associations, newspapers and journals, radio and television: a whole civilisation of informed, contentious public life.
Now, he warned, that fabric was in tatters – the shared space in which citizens had learned to argue, to listen, to be surprised.
Old media, for all its faults, filtered. Editors decided what mattered. Reporters had to justify claims. Stories passed through people whose credibility depended on not being wrong. Then the internet created an enormous space in which those protections were absent.
Anonymity compounded the damage. It gave voice to those the gatekeepers had shut out. But it also dissolved the oldest constraint on public speech: the knowledge that you would be held to account. Mask the speaker’s identity and every inhibition against bad faith, abuse and sheer fantasy goes with it. Even free speech’s staunchest defenders – Milton, Defoe and Mill – feared it rendered freedom of expression unsustainable: but the internet made it ubiquitous.
The result is not a richer conversation but the dissolution of the conditions for any conversation at all.
The pond couldn't stand it ... there had to be some relief, some kind of plan for the future ...
Meanwhile, Our Henry meandered on, without a single mention of Thucydides, seemingly intent on catching his own tie.
Poor Old Henry, still not aware he's trapped in the lizard Oz hive mind:
This, Habermas suggested, is not solely, or even mainly, a failure of technology. It is a failure of character. Democracy calls for a particular kind of person: one a vigorous public sphere historically helped nurture.
The thinkers Habermas grew up with – Adorno and Horkheimer, steeped in Freud – had made this central to their project. Democratic citizenship requires psychological maturity: citizens strong enough in ego to renounce the fantasy of omnipotence, to tolerate uncertainty, to engage with genuine otherness without falling into projection or rage – or turning to violence.
The culture of the 1960s set out to overthrow the disciplines that sustained that maturity ethic. What replaced them was not liberation. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had described how the ego is first constituted through a mirror – through identification with its own image – and how the movement from that imaginary self-absorption to genuine engagement with others is never fully secure. What the 1960s unleashed was a reversion to the permanently adolescent self, craving recognition rather than truth, for whom life is a theatre and to live is to be applauded.
Social media’s echo chamber universalised that condition and gave it political form. Surrounded only by reflections of itself, the self no longer encounters the otherness that alone can discipline its demands, train its impulses and instil what Tocqueville called democracy’s “habits of the heart”. Without them, what follows is antinomianism: the narcissistic refusal of any authority that does not mirror the untamed self’s own convictions. The psychological conditions for submitting to the force of the better argument are no longer being reproduced.
The result is what we see on our streets, in universities and cultural institutions: the “neo-idiocy” of the highly instructed but semi-educated Adorno had diagnosed in 1967. And it is what Habermas sensed returning, with a vengeance, after October 7, 2023, when he condemned the wave of antisemitism he regarded as a sure sign of democratic collapse.
Worse still, philosophy itself was providing neo-idiocy with a fraudulent conceptual justification. Postmodernism was, for Habermas, nihilism’s latest incarnation. His answer to it was “communicative reason”: the proposition that it is analytically and practically impossible to make sense of knowledge without reference to an objective world, against which claims to truth can be cooperatively and rigorously tested.
Abandon those suppositions and you destroy the conditions for rational criticism. Terrifyingly, it reminded Habermas of Heidegger and his acolytes, who had lent their talent to Germany’s descent into the abyss – which is why he attacked postmodernism with such vehemence that Derrida accused him of adopting “a warrior tone”. Post-modernism’s epigones, and we have many, he dismissed as wanting the glory of intellect without its hard labour.
Habermas offered no truly credible solutions. He believed regulation could force platforms to change.
But you cannot pass a law restoring people’s willingness to be wrong. Nor can you fine your way to intellectual seriousness. And regulation cannot recreate what has been lost: the patience to follow a complex argument, the basic trust that the other side is not simply your enemy.
From birth to death, Habermas was a man of the left. More often than not, I found his politics wrongheaded. But there is a world of difference between disagreeing with a thinker and watching his tradition die. His vast erudition, the astonishing breadth, depth and subtlety of his arguments, his insistence on taking every objection seriously – these were the fruits of a left formed by centuries of the Western intellectual tradition. “We have to stand by our traditions,” he insisted, “if we do not want to disavow ourselves.”
Look at what has replaced it. Derrida was personally harmless, his weapons footnotes and impenetrable jargon. Those Habermas called “red fascists” are not: contemptuous of argument, quick to reach for intimidation, egged on by postmodern academics who preach rather than teach.
No doubt Habermas's refusal to contemplate the realities of the current ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza and the West Bank softened Our Henry's view of the old codger, though whether he was a lefty or a liberal will have to be put aside ...
Never mind, let's hear it for grifters and for the filthy rich ...
The pond still held out hope for that other Friday regular, Killer, but all he offered was a dose of Killernomics ...
The header: Rising rate of ignorance on money’s role in inflation; Critics argue central banks rely on shaky theories, with little proof that interest rates meaningfully control inflation.
The caption: Critics argue central bankers rely on uncertain models to guide rate decisions. Picture: NewsWire / Gaye Gerard
Sheesh, an unholy four minutes of Killernomics, IPA style, and again without a single reptile visual distraction:
Three eminent economists, Jeff Borland, Peter Dawkins and Ross Garnaut, recently took Australian Financial Review columnist Richard Holden to task in print for accusing the RBA of politicising monetary policy by downplaying the impact of public spending growth on inflation.
I’d like to take them to task for believing movements in the cash rate shifts inflation or unemployment in any observable or even meaningful way. It’s at best a theory without any serious evidence to support it.
In an exclusive interview last week with Hoover Institution senior fellow John Cochrane, one of the world’s top macro and financial economists for many years, I modestly suggested that “small moves in the cash rate could not have any kind of statistically tangible effect on the growth rate of the CPI”.
He went much further. “Let me tell you honestly, we don’t really know if higher interest rates raise inflation or lower inflation,” he responded. “I can tell you, it’s not even a theory, it’s a story.”
The idea basically relies on one data point: the 1980s. “Central banks raised interest rates and inflation came down, but 10 other things happened, too,” Cochrane said, pointing to Reagan’s presidential win, then massive spending cuts. “We fixed Social Security. We cut marginal tax rates from 70 per cent to 28 per cent. So, one episode is always dodgy.”
Another myth peddled around “rates day” is how low unemployment is supposedly inflationary. Yet inflation has been high when unemployment is high or low, rising or falling. It was rampant in the 1970s even as unemployment surged. It was subdued in the late 1990s and 2010s, despite labour markets tightening to levels once thought impossible. Japan has combined near-full employment with near-zero inflation for decades.
Moreover, the very definition of unemployment is arbitrary. The ABS said on Thursday the jobless rate had risen to 4.3 per cent in February, from 4.1 per cent a month earlier. But that definition excludes the near one million potential workers who say they want a job but either haven’t searched recently or aren’t available right away.
Roy Morgan’s far more realistic measure showed that in the same week what it calls the “real unemployment rate” fell to 10.6 per cent from 11.2 per cent in January. So is unemployment currently inflationary or deflationary? Pick your measure.
In May 2021, the brightest minds at Treasury and the Reserve Bank, using the latest economic models, forecast inflation would never exceed 2.25 per cent across the next three years. Yet within 12 months it had jumped to 6.6 per cent before peaking at 7.8 per cent in late 2023.
Again the pond simply had to break ...
Isn’t it obvious from the Covid years that the money supply, which almost no one talks about, has a far bigger impact on inflation than fiddling with overnight interest rates? Unemployment and inflation both soared everywhere from 2021, another major crack in the idea they are necessarily related.
Not enough people understand that inflation mainly arises from money creation by the banking system through (mainly home) lending, and governments via deficit spending.
More than a quarter of all the Australian dollars in existence were created in the past five years. M3, the broadest measure of money, in Australia grew at around 7.3 per cent, to $3.37 trillion, over the year to January, faster than any other relevant economic variable.
No wonder Australia’s inflation rate, at 3.8 per cent, was the highest in the 38-nation OECD before the war in the Middle East broke out, apart from Turkey, Colombia and handful of former Soviet bloc countries.
At least awareness is spreading. New shadow treasurer Tim Wilson on Wednesday said something no senior mainstream politician has said for years, when asked about inflation. “It’s too much money chasing too few goods. So what we have is more cash going into the economy than our economy is productively producing,” he told ABC radio.
We’re supposedly a free-market economy, yet one of the most important prices is set by bureaucrats who have for decades demonstrably failed to control inflation in the way they say they can. Why do perfectly sensible economic arguments about the folly of government pricing petrol or restaurant meals not apply to interest rates?
“Central banks have two masters,” Cochrane also explained to me. “One is the government, and the other is the banking system. Central banks do hold interest rates down to help governments finance deficits until the inflation gets really bad.”
Perhaps inflation hasn’t been mismanaged by officials who privately understand it, but managed for different ends.
Adam Creighton is Institute of Public Affairs chief economist.
The pond promises not to mock Dame Groan for at least a week ...
Sadly after all that, the pond had to personally supervise the despatch of this day's pearl clutching to the intermittent archive.
Which way did the Treasury secretary jump at Tuesday’s RBA meeting, where the board only narrowly backed the decision to raise the cash rate?
By David Pearl
And as some might feel pity for the Iranian people, caught between three blood thirsty regimes, the pond merely notes that the Australian Daily Zionist News is still carrying out its war-mongering duties.
This is not a war over territory or resources. It is an urgent act of self-defence for the protection of millions of innocent civilians and more.
By Hillel Newman
The name might not immediately strike a chord, but if you wander down to the end, you immediately catch the reason for the drift ...
Hillel Newman is Israel’s new ambassador to Australia.
The flow of guff culminated in this histrionic word salad ...
Over the past few days, the question has shifted from why and why now to: What comes next? In taking action, we are not only defending our citizens, we are helping to secure a safer and more stable future for our region and for partners such as Australia who share these values.
Some might think it's a weird sort of value, the murdering of 150+ plus Iranian schoolchildren, but whatever, Hillel, you do you ...
Again the pond personally supervised the intermittent archive placement, and merely offers this as a teaser trailer ...
Meanwhile, speaking of Western Civilisation, as the reptiles often do, WaPo offered this chilling headline ...
Israel urges Iranians to revolt but privately assesses they’ll be ‘slaughtered’
Now there's a government of Israel/Western Civilisation value in action ...
Anyone wanting to dive deeper - courtesy Jeff - can follow the link, and there was also this by Franklin Foer in The Atlantic...
And so on, and while there, follow the link to ...
Allied leaders know that any positive gesture they make will count for nothing. (*archive link)
He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.
For the past 14 months, few foreign leaders have been able to acknowledge that someone without any strategy can actually be president of the United States. Surely, the foreign-policy analysts murmured, Trump thinks beyond the current moment. Surely, foreign statesmen whispered, he adheres to some ideology, some pattern, some plan. Words were thrown around—isolationism, imperialism—in an attempt to place Trump’s actions into a historical context. Solemn articles were written about the supposed significance of Greenland, for example, as if Trump’s interest in the Arctic island were not entirely derived from the fact that it looks very large on a Mercator projection.
This week, something broke. Maybe Trump does not understand the link between the past and the present, but other people do. They can see that, as a result of decisions that Trump made but cannot explain, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked by Iranian mines and drones. They can see oil prices rising around the world and they understand that it is difficult and dangerous for the U.S. Navy to solve this problem. They can also hear the president lashing out, as he has done so many times before, trying to get other people to take responsibility, threatening them if they don’t.
The pond regrets there was simply no time to visit Vlad the Sociopath land ...
LOCK AND KEY
A very public call to overthrow the Russian leader came from an unlikely source—and within a matter of hours, that source was locked up. (*archive link)
The pond has learned its lesson ...
I believe!!!
That the coal loving reptiles have a hold of you.
I believe!
That the Lord God has sent me here to celebrate the filthy rich and grifters!
Four legged people!!
And now this, featuring the good oil ...
And now this ... 24 minutes long, but with Hugh and capitalism and economists in the lead roles, and the Emeritus Chairman in a supporting role ...
