He's baaack ... and so is Killer of the IPA ... the bromancer lives, and after many preliminaries, the pond will get to that dance ...

 

Gutless. Cowardly. Shameful. A weak-kneed flip-flopping bout of whining both siderism.

But typical, providing yet another reason not a drop of the pond's money goes to the Nine rags ...

Wilcox cartoon was divisive – and we apologise for the hurt it has caused (*archive link)
The Herald's View
Updated January 11, 2026 — 3.55pm first published at 3.50pm

Even more pathetic was the timid way they dropped it late on a Sunday arvo ...

Inter alia ...

When the pond checked, despite the mealy-mouthed carryon and craven cavorting, the 'toon was still to be found (in 'cartoons of the week', not in 'best of Wilcox'), but the cartoon section seemed to be in a paralysed stasis.

Naturally the reptiles were still on the case. 

When they sense weakness, they go for the throat and hang on like a pitbull ... and offer up outrageous slurs:

Cartoon on royal commission evoked a centuries-old trope about the power of Jews
Conflating anti-Semitism with Middle East politics forces many good people into silence, but being against anti-Semitism does not mean you support Benjamin Netanyahu. (that's an archive link)
By Catherine West

Amazingly, for a cartoon one step short of Adolf, or perhaps Martin Luther, the reptiles managed to reproduce it yet again.

Meanwhile,  the Writers' Festival fuss continued, with SBS on the weekend reporting that board members are now dropping out like hippies on Haight-Ashbury. The chair led the way.

A feeble counter-attack was mounted with reports that Randa Abdel-Fattah joined a cabal to get Thomas Friedman banned the previous year, but the obvious retort is that any Festival that would have Friedman as a speaker must be subject to the Groucho rule - that's not a club anyone should want to belong to.

The reptiles were on that case, with Nick on hand to conflate and confuse...

Writer’s ban about double standards, not free speech
Randa Abdel Fattah’s Writers’ Week punting is an overdue reckoning for cultural hypocrisy. (that's an intermittent archive link)
By Nick Dyrenfurth

Ain't he a wonder. Dropping a writer for political reasons or nervous nelly Adelaide great aunt sensitivities ain't about free speech? George would be proud.

The lizard Oz editorialist also chipped in with a profoundly ironical headline, what with the lizard Oz being a font of hate and endless jihads ...

Cultural left is conspicuous in its tolerance for hate
The stampede by authors to support anti-Israel author Randa Abdel-Fattah shows the extent to which toxic anti-Semitic ideology has been allowed to seep into our institutions.

This from a rag that has been spreading its special brand of poison for decades.

How weird did it get?

EXCLUSIVE
Put immigration policy on royal commission’s agenda: Lowy
Business leader Steven Lowy says freedom and tolerance in Australia is being abused and bigger cultural change is needed.
By Richard Ferguson and Sarah Ison

That was just a seafood extender EXCLUSIVE based on this offering ...

Bondi Beach attack was our wake-up call to act
The Royal Commission into anti-Semitism is welcome, but it cannot be seen as the end of the matter.
By Steven Lowy

If we're going to go down the 'ban Islamics like King Donald wanted to' route, then surely the RC must look into the hate speech emanating from News Corp. This can't be seen as the end of the matter. 

Surely the RC must look to expropriating the assets of a foreign owned disrupter of community harmony?

But chinks are beginning to appear in the reptiles' latest jihad.

The reptiles seem to have begun to realise that there were other things happening in the world, and that a monomaniacal obsession with turning a terrorist slaughter into a political wedge might be a turn off. So they turned on ...

Yes, big splashes and three whole stories, and luckily there's no need to go there, because anyone interested can find the details outside the hive mind.

Speaking of the real world, the pond noticed this yarn in Wired ... it's possibly not the time for the reptiles to indulge in their usual bout of climate science denialism, but just in case ...

The Oceans Just Keep Getting Hotter
For the eighth year in a row, the world’s oceans absorbed a record-breaking amount of heat in 2025. It was equivalent to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools. (here's an intermittent archive link for anyone who might hit a wall).

The opening, a teaser trailer:

Since 2018, a group of researchers from around the world have crunched the numbers on how much heat the world’s oceans are absorbing each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world’s oceans have absorbed more heat than the years before.
The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world’s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules’ worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That’s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules they absorbed in 2024. The research comes from a team of more than 50 scientists across the United States, Europe, and China.
A joule is a common way to measure energy. A single joule is a relatively small unit of measurement—it’s about enough to power a tiny lightbulb for a second, or slightly heat a gram of water. But a zettajoule is one sextillion joules; numerically, the 23 zettajoules the oceans absorbed this year can be written out as 23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
John Abraham, a professor of thermal science at the University of St. Thomas and one of the authors on the paper, says that he sometimes has trouble putting this number into contexts laypeople understand. Abraham offers up a couple options. His favorite is comparing the energy stored in the ocean to the energy of atomic bombs: The 2025 warming, he says, is the energetic equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean. (Some other calculations he’s done include equating this number to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or more than 200 times the electrical use of everyone on the planet.)
“Last year was a bonkers, crazy warming year—that's the technical term,” Abraham joked to me. “The peer-reviewed scientific term is ‘bonkers’.”
The world’s oceans are its largest heat sink, absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess warming that is trapped in the atmosphere. While some of the excess heat warms the ocean’s surface, it also slowly travels further down into deeper parts of the ocean, aided by circulation and currents.
Global temperature calculations—like the ones used to determine the hottest years on record—usually only capture measurements taken at the ocean’s surface. (The study finds that overall sea surface temperatures in 2025 were slightly lower than they were in 2024, which is on record as the hottest year since modern records began. Some meteorological phenomena, like El Niño events, can also raise sea surface temperatures in certain regions, which can cause the overall ocean to absorb slightly less heat in a given year. This helps to explain why there was such a big jump in added ocean heat content between 2025, which developed a weak La Niña at the end of the year, and 2024, which came at the end of a strong El Niño year.) While sea surface temperatures have risen since the industrial revolution, thanks to our use of fossil fuels, these measurements don’t provide a full picture of how climate change is affecting the oceans.
“If the whole world was covered by a shallow ocean that was only a couple feet deep, it would warm up more or less at the same speed as the land,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth and a coauthor of the study. “But because so much of that heat is going down in the deep ocean, we see generally slower warming of sea surface temperatures [than those on land].”

And so on, and at last the pond can speak science ... bonkers ... and there must be a 'toon for all that ...

...and speaking of bonkers, there was another astonishing disruption to the jihad.

At the top of the lizard Oz the jihad took a new turn. There was a new topic, a new target ...

And best of all?

He's baaack ...

Little Greggie with his axe, ready to pound away at assorted doors.

Oh how the pond has waited, oh how correspondents have yearned ...

It's only a three minute read, so the reptiles said, but the pond fell on it like a famished hound that hadn't had a feed in a month:

The header: Ayatollah beware, your brutal Islamo-Stalinst regime is under its greatest threat since 1979, The Iranian regime is still in overall control and becoming vastly more brutal in its crackdown. But neither its survival, nor its collapse, is sure. These demonstrations are unlike anything in post-revolutionary Iran.

The caption: An image showing protesters once again taking to the streets of Tehran despite an intensifying crackdown as the Islamic Republic remains cut off from the rest of the world. (UGC via AP)

Now it's true that the bromancer is in jihad mode, but when is he not?

It's also true that the only apparent difference these days between the mad Mullahs and King Donald is scale.

While King Donald's minions casually murder US citizens in the streets, the mad Mullahs really know how to do it, and indulge in senseless slaughter.

That said, forget King Donald's inclination to authoritarianism.

The bromancer is a specialist in selective rage and singular vision, so he had at the mad Mullahs ...

The dark and murderous vision of theocratic blackness and hatred of the West, and of Jews, which lies at the heart of the Iranian revolution, is under greater threat today than at any time since 1979.
The ayatollahs’ Islamo-Stalinist regime is being challenged by the people who know it best, the Iranian people. Iran is experiencing its biggest anti-government demonstrations since the 1979 overthrow of the shah.
As recently as a week ago, US intelligence assessed that the demonstrations lacked the strength to offer an existential threat to the rule of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the whole theocratic regime. Now, that analysis is much less certain. The protests have been running intensely for two weeks. Tehran has shut down the internet within Iran. When it did this in 2019, it provided cover for widespread massacres of protesters.
Something similar is under way now. Iranian hospitals are overwhelmed trying to treat shot and beaten protesters. Hundreds are dead, thousands imprisoned. Initially, there was some effort by Iranian government leaders to address economic distress and promise mild reform. That tone has now gone entirely. The government now calls protesters “enemies of God”, which means they face the death penalty. Nonetheless, images still emerge of government buildings in flames and huge demonstrations – in at least one case of a million people – in Iranian cities.

The reptiles flung in an AV distraction, Unrest across Iran is escalating as the regime cracks down on government protests amid a major internet blackout.

The bromancer carried on, and who would defend the mad Mullahs against his foam-flecked rage?

The ayatollahs have faced waves of huge demonstrations before. Dictatorships typically fall in one of four circumstances – when they begin to liberalise, when the leadership becomes divided and some side with the protesters, when a government loses administrative capability or when an outside power decisively assists the revolutionaries.
The Iranian regime is still in overall control and becoming vastly more brutal in its crackdown. But neither its survival, nor its collapse, is sure. The next weeks are critical. These demonstrations are unlike anything in post-revolutionary Iran.
First, they are at their foundation economic, initially led by shopkeepers, a class slow to anger but dreadfully dangerous to any regime. Iran, inheritor of the great Persian civilisation, has a sophisticated urban class that hates the regime. But that class alone can never prevail. These demonstrations include the working class, unionists, farmers, villagers.
Secondly, it’s clear now to all Iranians except for devoted theocrats and the ruling class itself that the Islamic revolution has brought nothing but misery and despair. The people hate the regime and hate the way they are forced to live.

Then came another visual interruption: This image from a video released on January 9, 2026, by Iranian state television shows a man holding a device to document burning vehicles during a night of mass protests in Zanjan, Iran. (Iranian state TV via AP)

The bromancer saw King Donald as an avenging angel, and never mind the vengeance doled out by his ICE minions:

Third, the regime is weaker than it’s been for decades. The relentless pursuit of the nuclear program, designed to provide an Iranian bomb, has delivered nothing but sanctions and the devastating Israeli and US military strikes. As with Venezuela, vaunted air defences proved worthless.
The Iranian leaders made a terrible blunder, perhaps on a par with Nicolas Maduro’s miscalculations in Venezuela, in refusing US President Donald Trump’s offer of economic engagement in exchange for abandoning the nuclear program. The Iranian people yearned for such a deal, for normality and prosperity.
Importantly, all those analysts, who represented a strong consensus among the international relations class, who argued that Israeli and US strikes would only unify Iranian sentiment behind the government and against the West have been proven completely wrong. Far from experiencing a patriotic surge of support, the Iranian government has never been more comprehensively loathed by its own people, who daily risk death in trying to change the regime.

There came a final visual distraction, This image, taken from anonymous user-generated video via AFPTV on January 10, 2026 shows a protester pulling down the Iranian flag from the balcony of Iran's embassy in central London. (Photo by Handout / various sources / AFP)

A hint of doubt crept into the narrative:

Trump has threatened to strike Iran if it kills its people in large numbers, as it has done in previous crackdowns. It’s hard to see how this would lead directly to regime change. But it’s a remarkable intervention. The US President is backing demonstrators seeking freedom and, as far as we can tell, the demonstrators are glad of any support they can get.

Yes, they can die in the streets, while King Donald makes vague threats and useless promises.

And then came an astonishing rewriting of history, as only the bromancer can do ...

Then there’s the role of the exiled crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah to rule Iran. The shah lost power not because he was too brutal, though his rule was brutal, but because he began to liberalise and provided space for the organised Islamist forces to lead a broad social movement, which they betrayed as soon as they seized power.

The Shah a liberal? C.f. the wiki on the subject...

The revolution was fueled by widespread perceptions of the Shah's regime as corrupt, repressive, and overly reliant on foreign powers, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom. Many Iranians felt that the Shah's government was not acting in the best interests of the Iranian people and that it was too closely aligned with Western interests, especially at the expense of Iranian sovereignty and cultural identity.

There were many other reasons - see the wiki for a detailed breakdown of events - but the result was most unfortunate, a classic case of jumping from the frypan into the fire, of the kind that King Donald supporters have done as they FAFO'd.

The bromancer couldn't resist one final illiberal flourish, worthy of a Khomeini:

One factor in the regime’s favour this time is that it’s unclear that the protesters, courageous as they are, have coherent leadership. But protesters have responded in surprising numbers to Pahlavi’s calls to take specific actions on specific days, and have taken to displaying the old lion-and-sun flag of pre-revolutionary Iran. The enduring appeal of monarchy in the Islamic world asserts itself once more.
The Iranian government characterises the vast social movement it’s confronting as an Israeli conspiracy, like Cathy Wilcox cartoon writ large.
Brave Iranians are daily dying for freedom. Naturally there are no left-wing demonstrations in their support in the West. But they do have Trump.

He had to drag Wilcox into the affair? 

And he dismissed King Donald with an imperious wave of the bromancer hand?

And the world still cast in that black and white, leftists bad, King Donald if not good, then somewhat endearing mind set?

Oh he'll never change, he'll always be the same old lover of the onion muncher ...and with any luck he'll help steer the lizard Oz into new jihads and provide ways for the pond to avoid the current RC jihad.

As for King Donald, luckily Killer of the IPA was on hand to talk about the monster in affectionate terms.

Sure it's day old stuff, but when has Killer of the IPA ever tasted stale and soggy?

The header: Trump’s ‘shock and awe’ in Venezuela reveals US naked self-interest; Trump’s brazen Venezuelan intervention has finally buried the so-called rules-based global order that never truly existed, leaving Australia in an awkward position.

The caption for the king in sociopathic smirk mode: President Donald Trump. ‘For all Trump’s talk of peace and the presumed isolationist bent of his administration, the President already has bombed at least a half-dozen countries.’ Picture: AP

Killer spoke in favour of King Donald the way a fervent Stephen Miller might manage. 

It was realpolitik all the way.

Henry Kissinger would have been proud. 

Perhaps not since Theodore Roosevelt has a US president been so blunt about the real reason America intervenes abroad: naked self-interest.
Members of Donald Trump’s MAGA base shouldn’t fear their children are about to die in the jungles of Venezuela in another doomed attempt to export democracy. They should admire their President’s candour.
Trump made no serious effort to cloak the seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, last week in the familiar language of freedom, humanitarianism or international law.
Instead, Trump spoke openly about monopolising Venezuela’s vast oil reserves for American benefit – a clarity that finally buried the so-called rules-based global order, which never truly existed anyway.
It’s hard to imagine even those diehard spruikers of the fictitious global order, Defence Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, uttering the phrase for years now that the ultimate guarantor of our security didn’t even attempt to cloak its brazen intervention as anything other than America First.
The outrage was understandable among the UN set – many thousands of high-paying bureaucratic jobs hinge on at least lip service to international law – but not the surprise.
For all Trump’s talk of peace and the presumed isolationist bent of his administration, the President already has bombed at least a half-dozen countries – including Somalia, Nigeria and Iran – not even one year into his second term. That’s far more than Joe Biden did in his entire four years in office.
The Venezuela move was “shock and awe”, Trump-style: no boots on the ground, no rhetoric about democracy or the enforcement of international law.
Trump was putting his administration’s freshly minted national security strategy into action.
“We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere,” the 33-page security strategy document states, describing what it calls the “Trump corollary” to the well-known Monroe Doctrine.

Cue an AV distraction featuring an image likely to stir a reptile almost as much as a lump of coal:  U.S. President Donald Trump began a meeting to discuss Venezuela with executives from some of the world's largest oil companies at the White House on Friday, saying he wants them to invest $100 billion in the country to vastly expand its production. Alex Cohen has more.

Killer saw it all as a glorious, unambiguous triumph:

It remains an unambiguous victory for Trump, who has shaken off the TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) accusation, and the US, which demonstrated its unrivalled ability to project power only months after a brilliant high-stakes bombing operation in Iran.
Whatever cover Trump’s “illegal” action supposedly gives Russia and China to behave similarly is dwarfed by their military and economic humiliation.
Energy-poor China, which must import about three-quarters of its oil, had seen Venezuela as a reliable supplier. Meanwhile Trump has deprived Moscow of billions of dollars’ worth of future arms sales to Caracas and highlighted the worthlessness of a freshly inked strategic partnership that Maduro signed with Russia last year.

But then came the downers, with several very big billy goat butts:

But the tactical success of Trump’s intervention victory could easily become a long-term strategic loss, not to mention the ongoing awkwardness for Australia in particular.
Venezuela’s oil reserves, which oil-exporting America doesn’t even need, are no El Dorado, costing more to extract per barrel than the prevailing oil price, owing to their poor quality and the difficulties of pumping them.
Top US oil executives, predictably, told Trump at the White House last week they wouldn’t invest the $US100bn ($149bn) required to update Venezuela’s dilapidated oil infrastructure without investment certainty, which is impossible without US boots on the ground – something Trump is unlikely to countenance.
The Venezuelan military, not to mention the families of the 80-odd Venezuelans killed in the US operation, aren’t likely to warm to US orders in coming months.
Maduro’s regime, which has brazenly stolen elections and presided over one of the biggest collapses in national income of any nation in modern history, is still in control.
New interim president Delcy Rodriguez, a veteran left-wing revolutionary, has a track record of publicly hating the US. Trump’s disregard for opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who symbolically offered her Nobel Peace Prize to the US President, won’t please pro-democracy forces within Venezuela either; they’ve realised their initial dancing in the street at the prospect of a new democratic government was rather premature.

Hah, hapless peasants, how Killer chortled with glee, as the reptiles interrupted with another AV distraction (is Killer that boring he always needs some relief?): Two leading members of Venezuela's political opposition were freed in a prisoner release on Thursday (January 8), according to local rights group Foro Penal and videos shared by Venezuelan journalists.

Downsides hurled into the distance, Killer carried on with his Millerisms:

Even if the US could miraculously lift Venezuelan output from roughly one million barrels a day to the three million it once produced in the 1970s, OPEC simply would adjust supply to neutralise any meaningful price impact. The US doesn’t even need the oil.
What Trump has achieved is a tactical victory, not a strategic one – and potentially a long-term loss. His audacious act will harden opposition to the US, which is no longer as relatively powerful as it once was in the immediate aftermath of the World War II era.
The spectacle of the US, home to only 4 per cent of the world’s population, dragging a foreign leader of a mid-sized nation before a domestic US court, whatever the accuracy of the charges, won’t sit well with many actual and future heads of state.
Russia and China, not to mention other South American nations, newly fearful of US power, will have strong incentives to redouble their defence spending and in particular their counter-espionage operations.
Trump publicly slammed US defence contractor Raytheon last week, but that industry is the only clear winner long term.
Almost two years ago I wrote an unpopular column in these pages arguing “there is not, and never was, a rules-based global order, despite our politicians’ fondness for evoking it”. I hate to gloat but we now have yet more evidence.
That’s cold comfort, though, given Australia’s near total reliance on the US – a nation most of our biggest trading partners and neighbours must privately if not publicly loathe even more – for our defence.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

What odd discordant notes on the back palate.

Cold comfort aside, is there any difference between Killer and his heroes?

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper of CNN on Monday, during a combative appearance in which he was pressed on Mr. Trump’s long-held desire to control Greenland.
“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said.

How Adolf would have been proud, and there's more for those with a taste for it at the both siderist NY Times (intermittent archive link):

Stephen Miller Offers a Strongman’s View of the World
President Trump’s trusted adviser is casting his hard-right gaze abroad, saying the world must be governed by “force.” 

Why is it that weedy types of the vampire Miller and Killer of the IPA kind are so devoted to the notion of brute power?

Did they suffer in childhood?

Roll on the taking of Greenland, and after that Canada (elbows up Canucks), with Killer of the IPA cheering from the sidelines; roll on Vlad the sociopath and his attempts to expand his repressive regime, with Killer of the IPA congratulating him on so much winning ...

For that matter, roll on mad Mullahs, with your repression just part of the iron laws that ruled the world since the beginning of time.

As for being an Xian, what the heck was that all about? Love, it seems, comes out of the barrel of a gun.

Watch out New Zealand, so many sheep make you a tempting target for Albo seeking a distraction from his woes ...

And so to finish with a few 'toons ...

In which Polonius goes Wilcox, while the Angelic One and the Canavan caravan honour Queensland's Norwegian Blue pollie...

 

The pond has done its best to avoid the lizard Oz jihad, but this is the pond's Sunday meditation, and Polonius's prattle has led the way these last few years.

Sadly, inevitably he is now, in his prim, ponderous, clucking and tut-tutting way, all in on the jihad, and the pond had no way around it...

But at least the topic allows the pond to do a brief Tootle flashback. 

Remember this? The Australian defends 'insulting' Bill Leak cartoon

Oh how they loved freedom of expression back then, how devoted they were to it ... 

Five years on, Bill Leak’s cartoon remains spot-on
If only outrage at Bill Leak’s cartoon were matched by outrage at the neglect and abuse of Aboriginal children. (that's a lizard Oz archive link)

Oh they were all in on cartoonists' rights to push boundaries and exercise free speech and be as tasteless as they liked ...

Now please allow the pond to parse the Wilcox cartoon that's got her into hot water, at least in la la hive mind land and with rabid Zionists...

What's anti-Semitic about that? (There's a reason must of the rags have run the story with 'anti-Semitic' in scare quotes).

It slags off special interest groups with obvious reasons for calling for an RC, with shilling lawyers leading the way for obvious reasons. 

It mocks sporting types and Labor has beens and it defames dogs who don't want to mention the Gaza genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Below the astro-turfing it shows Chairman Rupert leading the way for a bunch of unsavoury characters interested in making political hay, marching to Benji's drum beat (and has be been drumming, or what?)

The 'toon studiously avoids any Jewish stereotype or meme, while mocking the notion of 'grass roots' in favour of jihadist astro-turfing.

No wonder special interest groups and lobbyists and unsightly rags of the lizard Oz jihad kind took a fence and the gate too, and yet there are good reasons to tread warily with a RC, as outlined by Michael Bradley in Crikey ... (sorry, paywall)

Okay, the pond has done as much preliminary sanitation spadework as might be needed.

Now for that Polonial prattle ...

The header: Three strikes? Nine’s papers march to the beat of leftist drum, Could Nine’s Sydney Morning Herald be heading for a hat-trick in reverse after it listed Cathy Wilcox’s cartoon titled ‘Grass roots’ in its “best cartoons” category.

The caption: The Cathy Wilcox cartoon that featured in the Nine newspapers and online.

The old routine, the usual slur: label something as being leftist and that's all that needs to be said.

And yet, it will be noted in Daanyal Saeed's timeline for Crikey (sorry paywall) that the Nine rags and in particular the AFR were front and centre of promoting calls for an RC:

And so on and note how the SMH and the AFR feature, while Saeed seems to studiously ignore mentioning by name the lizard Oz jihad.

Speaking of that jihad, on with Polonius:

Could Nine’s Sydney Morning Herald be heading for a hat-trick in reverse? On January 7 it listed Cathy Wilcox’s cartoon titled “Grass roots” in its “best cartoons” category. Arsen Ostrovsky, who was injured in the terrorist attack on the Jewish community celebrating Hanukkah at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on December 14, has described Wilcox’s work as an “unadulterated form of Jew hatred”.
In her artistic statement against a royal commission into the massacre, Wilcox listed those who are supporting a “Royal Commission Now!” movement. Standing on a box containing grass, they are depicted as lawyers, business people, open-letter writers, sports greats, Labor has-beens and, wait for it, “dogs”, with a canine holding a bone declaring “Don’t mention the war”. This is a reference to the Hamas-Israel conflict following Hamas’s brutal invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023 – an implied criticism of Israel.
This group is being held up by those who appear to be Rupert Murdoch, Jillian Segal, John Howard, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Sussan Ley and David Littleproud. Marching behind with a drum sounding “boom, boom” is Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The message is clear: Australian lawyers, business people, open-letter writers, sporting greats and current and former politicians who support a royal commission are marching to the drum of the leader of the Jewish state of Israel – along with dogs.
To be fair, the SMH and The Age (which also carried the cartoon) have published letters critical of Wilcox’s cartoon. But it has not withdrawn the work.

And why should it? To be fair, there are arguments against an RC. 

Just to finish off that Bradley piece:

At this point, the reptiles slipped in a snap to make sure the hive mind knew who to blame, The controversial cartoon of Cathy Wilcox remains online.

Polonius carried on:

Late on January 7, commentator Mike Carlton, a vehement critic of Israel, posted on X: “It’ll be interesting to see … if the editors of the SMH and The Age back Cathy Wilcox and this cartoon; or will they turn to jelly beneath the howls of rage and the deluge of abusive emails from the Israel lobby?”
As far as I can determine, only one member of the group of six advocates of a royal commission is Jewish. But the leftist Carlton reckons that support for this cause is part of a conspiracy organised by what opponents of Israel call “the Israel lobby” or “the Jewish lobby”. No other religious or racial group in Australia is referred to by such a sneering “lobby” reference.
Last Thursday, News Corp’s tabloids carried an opinion poll by Melbourne-based research firm Fox & Hedgehog. It indicated that 54 per cent of Australians supported a royal commission with 19 per cent opposed and 27 per cent neutral or unsure. Jews comprise less than 0.5 per cent of the Australian population. Enough said.
At the time of writing, Wilcox’s cartoon remained on Nine’s website. Not so the article by Ahmed Ouf published in the SMH and The Age on December 23. Titled “I went to Bondi and hugged people who’d never spoken to a Muslim before”, Ouf wrote of his visit to Bondi Beach in the week beginning December 21. It is not clear how he knew whether the Jews he met at the murder site had ever spoken to a Muslim before. It would be difficult to live in Sydney or Melbourne without speaking to Muslims – or Christians, Buddhists, Hindus or nonbelievers.

The reptiles offered another visual distraction, Ahmed Ouf’s piece lacked judgment and was out of place. Picture: Tim Hunter

Polonius was now in full frothing and foaming mode and seemed to have forgotten the 'toon that so offended him, with new targets in his sights:

Ouf’s self-important piece lacked judgment and was out of place. After all, he was not the story and some of the victims had yet to be buried. Soon after publication, Nine retracted the piece “out of respect for the Jewish community” and apologised for “any distress its publication caused”.
No doubt “any distress” would have increased when it was revealed that Ouf had contested the seat of Blaxland in western Sydney, which is held by Labor frontbencher Jason Clare, at the May 2025 election – running as a Muslim Votes independent.
It also was revealed that Ouf supported the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement aimed at debilitating Israel.
Ouf received 19 per cent of the primary vote and failed to defeat Clare, whose vote increased after the distribution of preferences. So did the vote for Labor frontbencher Tony Burke in Watson. In one of the few revelations in Niki Savva’s book Earthquake, Burke told the author he believed the Albanese government would be returned at the 2025 election but “was convinced he was about to lose his once-safe seat of Watson”.

And some reptiles will still try to tell the world that this isn't about politics and scoring a political edge, as opposed to being concerned for the victims, their families and friends and the wider community: Dr Jamal Rifi opposed the concept of a Muslim party. Picture: John Feder

It's just another chance to slag off the Islamics, and hope that the RC will help continue the relentless lizard Oz jihad, so that more subscriptions can be sold (do they even pretend to be selling tree killer editions these days?) ...

I never believed that this would occur and wrote on these pages on July 6, 2024, in support of Dr Jamal Rifi, who opposed the concept of a Muslim party since he believed that “Australia is well served by the different parties that exist”.
The evidence suggests there is widespread support in Australia for a royal commission into the Bondi terrorist attack. Ideally such an inquiry should date back to the explosion of anti-Semitism at the Sydney Opera House demonstration on October 9, 2023 – which took place before Israel initiated its defensive war against Hamas.
NSW Police maintained that chants of “Where’s the Jews?” were heard. Others, myself included, heard “Gas the Jews”. But there’s little difference in intent. No demonstration has heard chants of “Where’s the Muslims?” – or the Christians, or the Buddhists or the Hindus.
Presenting ABC Radio National Breakfast this week, Barbara Miller queried independent MPs Allegra Spender and David Pocock as to whether there should also be a royal commission into Islamophobia. Neither agreed. Spender, who at times has been a critic of Israel, made the hard point that “the Jewish community is a community that lives behind security fences in a way that no other part of our community does”.
Apparently Miller was not convinced. On January 8, she told opposition frontbencher Jonno Duniam a “fair number” of ABC RN Breakfast listeners “don’t think a royal commission is a good use of time and money”. Quelle surprise. It is the far left (including some RN listeners) along with radical Islam that is at the forefront of anti-Semitism. If Nine offers a column to Miller to present her leftist views on this issue it will complete its reverse hat-trick.

It's the far left at the front? And no mention at all of the far right?

There are none so blind as those who refuse to see their comrades in arms...

And so to the bonus, and to more pleasant times with the Angelic one...

The header: Vale, Ron Boswell, a true politician of the people; The former National Party senator was not every political and general know-all’s idea of a great man, but he was.

The caption: What you saw was what you got from Ron Boswell, delivering his valedictory speech in the Senate in 2014. Picture: Gary Ramage

Back in the day in Tamworth, the pond was always reminded that it was wrong to speak ill of the dead.

But those who said it routinely spoke ill of the dead - Stalin, Hitler, all that mob ...

The pond decided if you happened to chance on a d*ckhead (*google bot approved), you had every right to speak ill of them...

Take Ron. Someone, please take him. Okay, grim reaper, if you must.

He wasn't a d*ckhead on the grand Adolf scale, but he did his best to ruin the planet for everyone ...and he found a home in the AFR for it, peddling his folksie humbug cornball braces-wearing image ... (that's an archive link)..

And again (that's an archive link):

And so on and on and on, always keen to f*ck the planet (*google bot approved), and he was also a terrible bigot and hater. See this page for his thoughts on gay marriage.

Inter alia:

Madam Acting Deputy President Crossin, I understand we are debating your bill today. I find it a very serious debate. In fact, to me it is one of the most serious debates that we have ever had to face in this parliament, because it will fundamentally affect the way Australia reacts as a society. In my party, one of the basic philosophies is that the family is the basic unit of society and without a family you do not have a society. I cannot imagine a more severe attack on the family than undermining marriage. It is what the whole of our society is based on. It is what the whole of society over centuries—probably from the start of man—has been based on: a man and a woman getting together to procreate children and for those children to stay together under the care of a mother and a father. Without that, what do you have? What is society? That all stands before us. Fortunately, the Marriage Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2012 is not going to get through, but I have been around long enough to know that this is only the first attempt.
But what I want to say to you, Madam Acting Deputy President, is: yes, in the inner city suburbs of West End, South Brisbane and Redfern, there might be a bit of support for this, but there is certainly no support for it out in the western suburbs among the blue-collar workers, where the families are strong. Among the different communities, whether they be Catholic, Muslim or Jewish, it is an anathema. It is an anathema with my party. Senator Bishop said that he has not been lobbied very much. I can tell you, Madam Acting Deputy President, that I have not been lobbied at all except to say to me, ‘You stand up strongly for the basic unit of society, which is marriage and the family.’
I believe we now stand at the brink. We have to make a decision. Do we as a society turn away from everything we know and everything that our society is based on—the ideal that the family has been based on for thousands of years—or do we go the other way? Do we say, ‘Near enough is good enough, because it does not really hurt anyone, it does not cost anything and people want to do it; why not?’ and allow gay marriage and just give up on the ideal that the family is the basic unit of society and it gets there through marriage? We know from experience that the whole of the family—a marriage between a man and a woman—allows children to live in a safe, protected environment where they are allowed to grow into adults and pass strong values on to their children. The family is a continuum. We know this from experience, and therefore we continue with that ideal and look to uphold it.
I believe people have not thought this through. I think people in Australia do not give a lot of thought to these important issues, and we as members of parliament have to. From a distance, the issue of gay marriage looks a lot like other issues for Australian voters. From the outside it looks like it does not harm anyone, does not affect any individual who does not engage in it and does not seem to harbour any cost to the taxpayer or any other organisations. It seems relatively harmless—a relaxation of laws and conventions. If it does not hurt me and it does not hurt them, who does it hurt? It hurts society—that is who it hurts—and people have not thought it through.
What happens when the conventions are relaxed? What happens after the conventions have been removed? Marriage is based on a man and a woman, for the reason of having children. Two men and two women cannot conceive without some outside assistance. Marriage is not just a convention or a mere formality; it is a mechanism that was created by society to bring two sexes together and create a foundation of moral, social and legal protection and stability. Without this foundation, we are risking the lot. Like all things that have a foundation, society has a foundation. What is it based on? What is society based on? A man and a woman getting together, having children and then, in a broader sphere, an outer family of cousins, uncles and aunties, all providing support for the family, and that family fighting like crazy to make sure their kids get a good way of living, a good education and sometimes even the parents backing them into a home—people standing up for their family. The family is what people give their children. They send them to expensive schools and make great sacrifices for them because they believe in the family.
People think, ‘How does it affect me—a man marrying another man?’ If it is made legal they think it will not have an impact on their lives. But they have not considered the real harm that homosexual marriage can bring about, and there are three big harms in legalising homosexual marriage. It abolishes a child’s birthright to have both a mother and a father. Marriage includes the right to start a family. Under article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to marry comes with the right to start a family. If two men are legally able to marry, they obtain the absolute right to have a child via surrogacy. After gay marriage is legalised, a child can henceforth be brought into the world without ever having the right to a mother and father. Sometimes this happens inadvertently—through desertion or death—but it is not something we plan for; it is not something we want.
Same-sex marriage says that a mother or a father does not matter to a child—and it does. Two mothers or two fathers cannot raise a child properly. Who takes a boy to football? Who tells him what is right from wrong? What does he do—go along with the two mums? How does he go camping and fishing? Yes, there might be some attempt by one of the mothers to fill in as a father figure but it will not work. It is defying nature. And what about a young girl changing from a teenager into a young woman? Is it fair to say to her, ‘You don’t have a mother; your mother can’t take you shopping’ or to not be able to help her understand how her body is changing? What are we trying to do here? Why are we trying to defy what has been the right thing for hundreds of thousands of years? What suddenly gives us the inspiration to think that we can have gay marriage and it will not affect anyone?
I say to the people who very narrowly think this through or who do not think it through: it is more than saying, ‘It doesn’t hurt me; it doesn’t cost anything.’ It is a lot more than that. Once you have gay marriage in law, you have normalised the law, you have normalised homosexual marriage in law, which forces the normalisation of homosexual behaviour in the wider culture—
Senator Hanson-Young interjecting—
Senator BOSWELL: I will not be drawn in, Senator—especially in the school curriculum. I ask the people of the Western Suburbs: if you have gay marriage and it is legal, how can a teacher discriminate between normal marriage and gay marriage? He has to explain both as part of the curriculum. How can a teacher explain one part of the law but not the other?
So I ask these people who think it does not hurt me: do they want their children to be taught about gay marriage?
Senator Hanson-Young: Why not?
Senator BOSWELL: That is the question—why not? You do not find it objectionable from your side of politics. My side of politics finds it abhorrent and does not want any part of it.
But that is what we have to face up to, because these things are like a salami slice. You start off thinking, ‘It doesn’t hurt anyone.’ Then: ‘Oh, little Freddy’s got to go listen to why homosexual marriage has nothing wrong with it. Why is nothing wrong with it? Because it’s legal. This parliament has made it legal.’ I say to the people: do you want that for your children? Some of you will not object. Some will think it is a good thing. Certainly the progressive left will think it is wonderful. But I do not think they will think it wonderful in the western suburbs—the people who rely on the ALP to defend their jobs through the unions. That is why they are there. They are not there to have their kids taught about homosexual marriage versus traditional marriage. That is going to happen the very day this legislation gets in. Once you legalise something, you cannot discriminate against it. It is happening already in America, where homosexual marriage became law and the next thing in Massachusetts was the teachers teaching about homosexual marriage and traditional marriage.
I want to quote from the Australian Education Union. This is what the teachers said: ‘If Australia normalises homosexual marriage, the Australian Education Union’s 2006 gender identity policy would be implemented. Homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism and the intersexed need to be normalised. All curricula should be written in non-heterosexist language.’ I suspect the Greens would not see any objection to that but I suspect the Labor people would go into meltdown, because this will be out there. This is what the teachers union have said—and why shouldn’t they? If it is legal, they have to teach it. If it is legal, it has to be taught. You cannot just pick out what you want to teach and not teach.
If homosexual behaviour is legalised then schools will have to treat homosexual behaviour and marriage on the same basis as heterosexual behaviour and marriage. Parents will no longer have the right to object to these teachings. All conscientious objection to both gay marriage and the normalisation of homosexual behaviour in the school curriculum would be abolished. That is what those people who think, ‘It doesn’t hurt me, it doesn’t cost me; if it doesn’t, let’s just let it go through’ are opening up. Let’s think a bit deeper because it is your society, your Australia that you are playing with.
I ask people, particularly from the Labor Party—and I admire the people who have had the courage to stand up over there: do you want your children to go into classrooms that give equal weight to heterosexuals and homosexuals? I do not think many of them do. There will be a few who support the Greens and think it is wonderful, but they are hugely in the minority. John Howard, whose views I admire and respect, said last year:
Changing the definition of marriage, which has lasted for time immemorial, is not an exercise in human rights and equality; it is an exercise in deauthorising the Judaeo-Christian influence in our society, and anybody who pretends otherwise is deluding themselves.
I agree with him. We are told there will be certain legislation that will respect churches and that, if they do not want to perform certain marriages, they will be excluded, but it does not take long for the antidiscrimination committee, instrumentalities, the Greens and GetUp! to start to wage a campaign.
If business or the churches object to hosting homosexual marriage or to blessing them, they will be hit. They will put up a defence, but it will only last for a certain time. They will be crushed by the anti-discrimination laws. We have already seen it happen in countries such as Denmark. The churches will have no choice but to facilitate homosexual marriage. We might push it out three years, four years or five years, but it will happen in the end. We have seen it happen with the abortion laws. You cannot walk away from them. You have to offer it or if you do not offer it then you have to find someone who will do the job. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that any church situated in a member state where same-sex marriage is legal must marry same-sex couples or be found guilty of discrimination. It will happen here.
Marriage is a social institution with a biological foundation. All society does with marriage is to reinforce this biological fact, to keep men with their mate and then help raise their children. Society merely recognises that marriage is the most important relationship in nature and works to reinforce it. It has no right to reinvent marriage. Politicians have no right to redefine marriage, only to reinforce the biological purpose of marriage. I recall when there was discrimination—when there was huge discrimination—that I had a phone call from a certain minister who said, ‘We have just had a request for a gay doctor to bring his gay partner in and practice in a certain country community. We thought you would object, that you were the person most likely to object. If you let it go, it will go through.’ I said, ‘I could not possibly object to that, that would be discrimination.’ I think it was in 2008 that Warren Entsch brought in, or agitated through the party, that all forms of discrimination be removed. There is absolutely no discrimination against gay people other than the discrimination between heterosexual and same-sex marriage. Frank Brennan, the former chair of the National Human Rights Consultation Committee, said:
I think we can ensure non-discrimination against same-sex couples while at the same time maintaining a commitment to children of future generations being born of and being reared by a father and a mother.
His political masterstroke was to defeat Pauline Hanson in the Senate in 2004. He did it by organising numerous small groups. He got together the hunters, fishers and farmers to organise their preferences. It was like herding feral cats, but he did it.

And so on - you can never shut a bigoted politician when he's riding a favourite hobby horse - and the pond quoted Ron at such length to show why the pond will cheerfully speak ill of the dead, especially loathsome bigots dressed out in folksie garb, laden with climate science denialism.

Now on with the Angelic one's obituary:

This week a great and very good man died. Former National Party senator Ron Boswell was not every political and general know-all’s idea of a great man, but he was.
As Liberal Party elder John Howard said of him this week, “Ron’s battle with Pauline Hanson in 2004 symbolised his commitment to an open and tolerant National Party.”
However, although Ron’s defeat of Hanson was his most notable political achievement, unlike many contemporary seemingly conservative politicians he was a true small-C conservative. He never waded into the ever-shifting shallows of popular causes.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap and a caption: Senator Boswell’s political masterstroke was to defeat Pauline Hanson in the Senate in 2004.

That's it, that was his masterstroke?

The last time the pond checked Pauline was still waltzing into the Senate wearing a burqa while Ron is doing a Norwegian blue parrot imitation and pushing up daisies.

Carry on Angelic one, celebrate the bigot:

He was grounded in the fundamental beliefs: freedom and the family, especially the importance of the natural family. When the forces of conservatism had caved in to popular causes purporting to be about individual freedom, he knew that it was a strong nuclear family – mother, father and kids – that fostered the co-operation and individual resilience that was the only true bulwark against ideological domination by government. He realised that eventually this led to a corrosion of individual freedom and national weakness and uncertainty. The idea that “the government should fix it” was not in Ron’s lexicon.

The reptiles quickly interrupted with an AV distraction:

National Party Stalwart and former Queensland senator Ron Boswell has died at the age of 85. He passed away at his Brisbane home surrounded by family. Mr Boswell served as a senator from 1983 until retiring in 2014. He acted as the Nationals' senate leader for 17 years and the Father of the Senate from 2008. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says he will be remembered for his passion for his state and country.

Apparently Ron was a cosmopolitan, or so the Angelic one suggests:

Ron was a supporter of multicultural Australia, but unlike many other politicians he did not wave the multicultural flag without doing too much to support the people it encompassed. I remember particularly the Vietnamese contingent who were prominent at his farewell from politics in 2014.
The main thing that made him different was his ability to stay in touch with the people he represented. As he stated in his autobiography, he was very much of the view that politicians had moved too far away from the people they were supposed to represent. I think we all feel this and it affects many issues, even the current furore over a royal commission.
My view of Ron is as a friend and an outside journalistic view. Ron had no “image”. You got what you saw. Sartorially speaking, he was frankly a bit of a mess. His tie askew and shirt usually partially flapping outside his trousers, he always called you “mate”, and what with being somewhat overweight for long periods and possessing eyes that were not exactly aligned, he could easily be mistaken as an Australian politician in the Les Patterson mould. He often liked to talk about his humble beginnings as “a paintbrush salesman”.
However, Ron’s interests were wide-ranging, from supporting scientist Alan Mackay-Sim’s groundbreaking work on adult stem cells, to speaking out about the persecution of Christians in Syria, and helping some to leave. He had an acute sense of where the truth of an issue really lay.

It seems he also spared time for the ladies, no doubt happy to share a lamington or a pumpkin scone with them, Ron Boswell arrives at the LNP International Womens Day lunch at the Tattersall's Club in Brisbane in March 2015. Picture: Mark Cranitch

The Angelic one loved the way that Ron did his best to do down research of an un-Catholic kind:

On the stem cell issue his support of MacKay-Sim’s research into mature stem cells was crucial and should be counted as an achievement as important as the defeat of Hanson.
Initially, the script trotted out to the media and the public at large was that stem cells harvested from human embryos had almost magical qualities. They could be coaxed into any type of tissue and this would cure diseases from Alzheimer’s to cancer and replace damaged nerves and tissue in victims of paralysis. The public was bombarded with images of famous people who were paralysed after an accident, and embryologist Alan Trounson’s embryonic stem cell research was granted $40m.
However, embryonic stem cells didn’t work the way they were supposed to and, worse, they had to be harvested from live human embryos, which was highly unethical, as was the next solution: cloning embryos and harvesting their cells. Nevertheless, Australia passed laws legalising this and Ron was appalled.
However, behind the scenes, Mackay-Sim in Queensland had already developed a technique to harvest one’s own cells from nasal cells. This would allow for successful auto transplants and regeneration. It was part of world-first research, but in all the clamour over embryos almost no politician was interested in adult stem cell research – except Ron.
He went in to bat for Mackay-Sim and managed to secure funding for him to continue with his work. This research has led to the development of better techniques for transplant, especially for spinal cord repair. Meanwhile embryonic stem cell research has little to show for it. Trounson later decamped to California and greener grant pastures.

Judge the man by the company he kept and the causes he took up, sayeth the pond, as the reptiles provided visual evidence, Senator Ron Boswell with Alan Jones at the No Wind Farm Rally on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra in June 2013.

Apparently news of the parrot's disgrace has yet to reach the Angelic one or the lizard Oz hive mind, as the Angelic one finished with a flourish of Latin:

In my opinion this was one of Ron’s outstanding achievements. Despite his at-times shambolic appearance and old-fashioned Queensland speech, Ron could see when it was the so-called smart people who were bamboozled and confused by clever PR.
He understood the science, which isn’t all that difficult but a lot of people, including politicians, were simply too uninterested or too careless of the ethical implications to see what was happening with embryonic stem cell research and allowed themselves to be misled by what has been dubbed “Frankenscience”.
Along with his other good points, Ron was a very warm-hearted person. After the death of his son he brought up and educated his grandson and was a hands-on grandfather, involved in his grandson’s schooling and the trends in education of all young people.
Along with other politicians I have known I’ve had Ron over to dinner a couple of times. I remember the panic when we had to make sure we had a sturdy, well-constructed chair for the senator’s large bulk. We knew Ron did not expect haute cuisine with his favourite rose, but who else but “Bozzie” would turn up at the front door not with wine but with a huge Cryovac bag full of crabmeat?
Vale Ron, a great man, a good Christian. Requiescat in pace.

If only hell existed, so that the pond might add best wishes to the wayward rogue, in the hope that he  requiescats in inferno ...

And so to a bonus for those who haven't had enough of Ron ...

Yes, the old rogue brought out the Canavan caravan, in the Currish Snail.

Why not celebrate it, if only for the sake of the pond's deep north correspondents ...

This is how the Canavan caravan proudly tweeted it ...

This is the archive link:

Opinion: Ron Boswell’s unkempt appearance belied his political savvy
Ron Boswell was not the most fashionable senator going around, but he could outsmart career politicians, writes Matt Canavan.
Matt Canavan
3 min read

And for those too lazy to head off to the archive, this is the Canavan caravan, fuelled by coal and bigotry:

The curious thing about this is how Tamworth's shame features prominently, as if keeping the company of drunken, rolling in the gutter rogues was a virtue ...

It got so extreme that the reptiles in the final snap featured a glowering Barners, and only the back of the Queensland blue parrot's head ...

Phew, that's more than enough. especially given the bushfires and floods that have been raging and surging around the country.

Just time left for more than a few 'toons ...