Of course the venerable Meade led the Weekly Beast with the lizard Oz's flip flop belly flop attempt at kow towing to Pentagon "champagne" Pete ... Yes … er, no: The Australian backflips after signing on to Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon reporting rules ... but that piece of reptiliana was soon overshadowed by the attention seeking of Tamworth's eternal shame.
In turn Barners was a flash in the Graudian pan, David Littleproud urges Barnaby Joyce to stay in the Nationals amid speculation of a jump to One Nation, but there can be no end to once proud Tamworth's eternal humiliation while the Beast brays at the world.
Sadly, Barners' braying wasn't to be sighted anywhere on the top of the digital edition of the lizard Oz this morning ...
Instead there was some Nine bashing, and poor, hapless Susssan, looking like she was easy meat for the lettuce in their race ...
How wretched are the lizard Oz graphics?
Sensibly no one took credit for making the rag look like Mad magazine from the 1960s.
And how desperate must readers be to head off to the fragile archive to finish the read ...
Income tax cuts, slashing red tape: Ley to return warring Libs to policy traditions
Sussan Ley will vow to go to the election with a package to cut income taxes, slash government spending and unwind Labor’s IR agenda, as she attempts to unite the Coalition.
by Greg Brown
Meanwhile the reptiles were bleating about King Donald's tariffs, apparently unaware that their kissing American cousins at Faux Noise were on board ...
Business sounds Trump tariff warning as PM heads to Washington
Half of Australian industrial businesses report damage from the US tariffs, as employers warn of the ‘greatest disruption to global trade in a century’.
by Geoff Chambers
Geoff chambered another round ...
Donald Trump, yet to appoint his US ambassador to Canberra, will likely be invited to visit Australia. With hopes the Quad could soon be rescued, Trump may find his way Down Under.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor
Geoff treated it as a blood sport, with Albo about to enter the Colosseum... with this a teaser trailer ...
Over on the extreme far right there was the usual assortment, of the kind a deprived kid might find at the bottom of an Xmas stocking.
Instead of lollies, there were assorted lumps of coal ...
Major Mitchell was on hand to deliver the usual drivel for the Daily Zionist News ...
Left-leaning media outlets want to see Donald Trump’s peace plan fail – and it colours their reporting.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist
The pond has no time for the Major these days, especially as just across the way came the news that Israel had violated the ceasefire, with finger pointing and killings on both sides ...
Israel strikes Gaza after Hamas ‘killed troops in attack’
Israel has conducted dozens of air strikes across Gaza and halted humanitarian aid after it accused Hamas of killing troops in what is shaping up to be the biggest test yet of the fragile ceasefire.
By Dov Lieber and Anat Peled
The pond decided it would hold over to a late arvo post simpleton Simon saying ...
A Menzies bot offering guidance mightn’t be so strange amid desperate days for the Coalition, but in that absence, advice from the Tories’ Silicon Lady nails it.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst
What weird manner of fish or fowl is a "political analyst"?
Ditto the pond kicked the craven Craven to the arvo slot, but again, if the fragile archive is working, punters can get ahead ...
Victoria’s obsession with being the most progressive – that is, fashionably out there – state in Australia mixes policy ineptitude with the blackest of black humour.
By Greg Craven
The pond was yet again reminded why Melbourne is so much better than a Minns Sydney ... apart from the weather, and it being home to an array of barking mad Xian fundamentalists ...
Of course there was no mention in any and all of this of the No Kings rallies across the disunited states, nor any of the colourful signs and costumes...
Instead Lord Downer was on hand to offer sage advice on matters American...
The header: Anthony Albanese’s meeting with Donald Trump hinges on China, While Trump will want to drill down on Beijing, Albanese’s big takeaway should be inspiration from the US leader’s energy and ambition to get things done.
The caption revealing that Emilia had taken credit for the wretched collage: President Donald Trump will be interested Anthony Albanese’s assessment of China and its leader, President Xi Jinping. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella.
Please, Emilia, for the sake of humanity, sanity and your reputation, blame AI.
Lord Downer was all in on men in masks abusing hapless citizens ...
What Trump will be interested in is Australia’s assessment of China. This is the overwhelming preoccupation of US foreign policymakers. They are much more interested in China, and what they see as the competitive threat of China, than they are in Ukraine and the Middle East, all of which they think are eventually manageable.
What should impress the Prime Minister is Trump’s extraordinary capacity to get things done. He’s been back in office for just nine months, and in that time he has implemented just about all of the policies he promised during last year’s election campaign. First and foremost, he has stopped stone dead illegal immigration and started a controversial process of deporting illegal migrants. If that were all he had done in his first nine months, then that would still be seen as a substantial achievement. But the list goes on.
A substantial achievement? The list goes on?
Some list, some achievement...
Ah Lord Downer means stuffing trade and stuffing the planet ...
In the race with China it might be as well to remember the words of Simon Tisdall in the Graudian ... Xi Jinping is preparing to go toe to toe with Donald Trump – and there will only be one winner
Yet later this month, the American pharaoh-president is due to face a far less biddable tough guy: China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Bookmakers may withhold odds on the outcome. In the US-China race for 21st-century primacy, Xi is sprinting ahead, assisted by spur-heeled Trump’s many missteps...
And to conclude ...
For the UK, this prospect is worrisome, to put it mildly. Scorned by Beijing, patronised by Washington, decoupled from Europe and reduced to the role of lonely bystander incapable of articulating a coherent China policy, Britain can only hope it avoids becoming collateral damage.
It's pretty much all anyone can hope for as the reptiles bizarrely stuck with the notion that this was a family.... NATO chief Mark Rutte speaks with Donald Trump as NATO country leaders gather for a family photo. Picture: AFP
If it's a family, it's a bloody dysfunctional one, for all Lord Downer's pumping up of the King ...
And then there’s energy. Trump has pulled out of the Paris climate change agreement and deregulated America’s energy markets. Oil prices have dropped in the US by about 8 per cent since he resumed office, while gas prices have dropped by a little less, around 3 per cent to 4 per cent. But still, that makes manufacturing as well as daily living a little cheaper, and industry more competitive.
By bullying foreign corporations and threatening high tariffs, Trump has forced corporates to invest very heavily in the United States. This has led in just nine months to pledges of an estimated $US2.8 trillion ($4.32 trillion) worth of new investment in America. By the way, this isn’t particularly good news for us, but nevertheless Trump is the President of the United States, not of Australia. Just in case you’re wondering, the total new private sector investment in Australia over the past year increased by contrast by a paltry 1.7 per cent.
Only a deeply stupid man of the Lord Downer kind could see any upside in King Donald as climate scientist ... President Donald Trump dismissed climate change as “the greatest con job” in the world during his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday (September 23), doubling down on his scepticism of global environmental initiatives and multilateral institutions.
So King Donald withdrew from the world, and consigned the planet to a climate disaster? Apparently that constitutes real involvement in the rest of the world, at least in Lord Downer's alternative universe ...
When it comes to the world we were told that Trump was an isolationist and would withdraw American involvement from the rest of the world. How wrong that Democrat-led forecast has proved to be! Trump in just nine months bullied the Europeans into increasing their defence expenditure and increasing it very substantially. Presidents since John F. Kennedy have been trying to get the Europeans to carry more of the burden of NATO defence spending, but it’s taken Trump to get them to do it. And he did that in a matter of months.
Did he?
Others might differ on that take...
Trump’s approach has begun to fray at the bonds binding the alliance together. Rather than working on Trump’s terms, the Europeans have been seeking their own arrangements with Iran and separate trading agreements with some of the countries that were part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, which the United States left in January 2017. In contrast to Trump’s penchant for personal diplomacy, public histrionics, and mixed signaling towards NATO, Kennedy and Johnson mounted calmer, better coordinated campaigns to get America’s allies to increase their defense spending. They used defter mixtures of unilateralism, bilateralism, and public and private diplomacy. Furthermore, both presidents took this course during one of the more perilous periods of the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear Armageddon seemed very near, and they did so while maintaining the alliance’s cohesion. (here)
Well yes, but Lord Downer is a starry-eyed MAGA loon ...
Then there’s Iran’s nuclear program. Presidents Obama and Biden laboured to try to get Iran to agree to a short-term arrangement suspending their nuclear program. That wasn’t for Trump. He told them that either they should destroy their nuclear program or he would destroy it for them. With the assistance of the Israelis, he did just that. It would cost Iran billions of dollars, which it doesn’t have, to rebuild its nuclear program, and if it tried, it would just be destroyed again. Common sense tells you that’s the end of Iran’s nuclear program.
Lord Downer's mindless hagiography continued in snap form, Donald Trump and regional leaders at the Gaza peace summit in Egypt.
Lord Downer waxed lyrical ...
But ultimately what matters is what political leaders are able to achieve, not the political prejudices of hacks.
At long last there came a very minor billy goat butt ...
Don’t get me wrong: Trump still has work to do. He hasn’t ended the Ukraine war yet, and that’s proven a far harder task than he had anticipated.
But that minor billy goat butt was only put in place so that Lord Downer could butt that billy goat into oblivion ...
But watch this space; he’s working at it.
In turn that billy goat butt was very short, because there came a few more problems for Lord Downer.
Such a billy goat, so many butts...
Albanese should reflect on the message of the Trump administration. We all want political leaders who know what they want to do with their political power and get on with getting things done. That’s what we need in Australia.
Mind you, Australia doesn’t need protectionist and statist economic policies, so favoured by populist politicians in Europe and by Trump, and nor would we ever vote for such a personality. Effective as he may be in America, Trump appeals far more to a very different American culture than such a personality would appeal in Australia.
Does Lord Downer think his personality still holds appeal in Australia?
Who knows, but the power of delusions is strong in this one, as the reptiles produced another distraction, Mr Albanese with French President Emmanuel Macron at the G20 Leaders' Summit in India in 2023. Picture: AFP
Lord Downer wrapped up his outing with a job description, which only served to remind the pond that he'd been an epic, Iraq war mongering, failure in his own time...
Instead of faffing around pretending that we can somehow change the global climate, and making vacuous statements about the Middle East, it’s about time we started addressing some of our core issues. We need to reduce our energy costs, do something about escalating government deficits and debt, and learn that governments have to live within their means.
We need to get away from this idea that economic growth comes from public expenditure; it doesn’t. It comes from profitable private sector investment in innovative and productive industries.
Overall, someone needs to rekindle a sense of excitement to get Australia’s mojo back. Australia has become becalmed, has lost its energy and ambition. We need leadership to restore that.
So that’s the lesson from Trump: not that we should copy his style or, for that matter, necessarily copy his policies. We’re a different country with different values. But we need politicians who call out about our problems and try to re-energise our country by solving them.
That's the lesson to be learned?
Slavishly worship King Donald and then disavow his relevance? Praise his policies and then avoid copying them? Blather on about being a different country with different values? Take from the King only the need to be an energiser bunny, and never mind the many malapropisms and stupidities and divisive authoritarian cabal he's set in motion?
What a foolish Adelaide fop Lord Downer is ...
And so to what is just a variant serve of seminarian science, with the careering Craterist carrying on in his usual quarry-whispering way.
This day's outing is beyond the valley of the risible, with the flood waters fool rabbiting on about gambling integrity by pushing ideology as science ... yet another case of rampant projection ...
The header: CSIRO gambles its integrity pushing ideology as science, Government scientists dabbling in behavioural science in the race to achieve net zero should know minds are not manipulated as easily as behaviourists like to think.
Where would any climate science denying reptile outing be without a terrifying snap of whale-devouring windmills, and sure enough ... Wind farms near Portland in Victoria’s southwest.
The deeply ideological Craterist, without a hint of irony or of a science degree in his past, but pickled in ideology like a sardine in brine, was in bog standard form ..
The CSIRO’s experiments in embedding climate messaging into popular culture are more evidence of an agency drifting dangerously out of its lane, crossing the line from applied science to propaganda. The project is led by Danie Nilsson, a behavioural psychologist who graduated from the University of Queensland with a PhD in Conservation Psychology.
Her expertise in this somewhat obscure field of knowledge has been put to good use by the CSIRO, which assigned her the task of developing narratives for the Nine TV show, Renovate or Rebuild. The aim is to “drive impactful behavioural change” in viewers. Nilsson worked with the producers at the storyboard stage to embed sustainable messaging in scripts. She then tested its effectiveness using surveys and focus groups.
She encouraged the use of “social normative messaging” by using apparently throwaway lines, such as “everybody is doing it these days”, in a segment discussing the installation of rooftop solar and batteries. “Putting rooftop solar on our house was a no-brainer,” says one couple in a snippet from the show posted on YouTube. “Some might say it’s like having money fall from the sky.”
The pond has no idea where the reptiles dig up ancient fossils so they can turn up on Faux Noise down under, but sensibly they preferred another terrifying snap of whale-ravaging windmills, littering the Hume with corpses down Goulburn way, Former Howard government minister Peter McGauran has ripped into the government’s target of net zero by 2050 – claiming it will “never happen”.
It reminded the pond of a precious detail in the Rowe of the day ...
... but more of that at close of play ...
Nilsson’s research concludes that this works. She found viewers were more likely to prioritise the installation of solar panels or the purchase of an electric vehicle than non-viewers. The differences in attitude are relatively small but when the goal is to reach net zero, every little bit helps. The message is reinforced with celebrity endorsements. Using mass media to alter human behaviour is an art the advertising industry has been developing for years. Advertisers are reported to spend $US30bn ($46.33bn) a year on product placement, a figure that will probably surprise no one. You would have to be a remarkably naive viewer to think Tom Cruise wore Ray-Bans in Top Gun by chance.
Nudge tactics in pursuit of public policy goals are a different matter entirely. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s influential book, Nudge (2008), was initially embraced by Conservative prime minister David Cameron in Britain. Yet it chills the spine after the experience of Covid-19, when we were nudged into doing so many things we now recognise as unnecessary at the very least.
Seething resentment is just standard Craterism, as he sought out like minds to help crater the planet ... Journalist Andrew Neil says both the UK and Australia could increase their defence spending from the money being funnelled into net zero policies. “You ask me where more defence spending would come from, in Britain and Australia, it comes from the money you were planning to spend on net zero,” Mr Neil said. “What is more important, making an infinitesimal difference in CO2 emissions … or defending the nation?”
Indeed, indeed, spend money on ways to blow sh*t up (*Blogger bot enforced), while sh*tting on the planet. What a win-win, maybe even bung on a third world war to show off all the brand new kit...
Engineering molecules or radio telescopes is one thing; engineering minds is another, venturing into the contested world of advocacy, ideology and moral instruction. The CSIRO’s strength lies in transforming nature for human benefit, not in reshaping humans to fit a constrained view of nature.
Channel 9’s management and board can answer for themselves about the ethics of screening agitprop television dressed up as reality TV. Renovate or Rebuild’s producer, The Blue Tribe Company, is unashamedly in the business of promoting net zero. Its company motto boasts: “We’re in the Business of Doing More Good”.
So-called “impact production” has become an established genre in the US, particularly in reality shows. Donald Trump may or may not be impressed to learn that his show, The Apprentice, employs an “eco-expert” to grill contestants on their green business attempts.
An article in Forbes magazine notes how the producers of Love is Blind encourage contestants to boast about their passion for sustainability to impress potential partners. The article claims that reality TV has “the power to normalise climate solutions by making sustainability exciting, aspirational, and a central part of the narratives”.
The American comedy drama Just Like That featured a lead character ordering a plant burger in a conscious attempt to impose climate-friendly norms.
The infiltration of popular culture with climate propaganda has the backing of UN climate change organisation the UNFCCC, which last year established a Film and Television Steering Committee “to harness the unparalleled power of entertainment to accelerate climate awareness and action on a global scale”.
Such a desperate paranoid, as if the only way people notice that the weather has been acting kinda funny lately is by watching the telly ...
Meanwhile, it was time for a snap of that hapless apologist, Former Victorian chief health officer Brett Sutton has admitted some Covid-19 measures went too far. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw
And so, with a deep sigh of relief, to the last of the Caterist ...
Winning the argument on policy fundamentals is the easy part. It is economically reckless, undermines energy security and industrial competitiveness, transfers sovereignty to global technocrats, and subordinates human welfare to abstract metrics.
Overcoming the sentiment that net zero is a virtuous aim and countering the seductive narrative of sustainability, niceness and kindness is not for the faint of heart, however. To challenge the delusion of net zero is to pick a fight with an international industrial propaganda complex.
What the party must do is separate the noise and pantomime within the beltway from the practical commonsense that prevails outside.
Minds are not manipulated as easily as the behaviourists like to think. Human behaviour cannot easily be reduced to a set of conditioned responses. As with the voice referendum, the condescension oozing from the advocates is an indication of weakness rather than strength.
Note the cunning way that the Caterist introduced the Voice at the very last, as he indulged in projection, what with his entire piece oozing with sneering condescension and a remarkable disconnect from reality ....
And so to discover that detail in the whole, with Rowe at least having a moment for Tamworth's eternal shame ... not to mention windmills, SMRs, nuking the bedding and the Doug Anthony all stars ...
