In which the best lizard Oz minds - the Ughmann, the bromancer and nattering "Ned" - assemble to deal with the current crisis ...

 

Ever discreet, the pond tries not to gloat about the joys of EV ownership, and the current pleasure in sailing past petrol stations, with the prices only of academic interest.

After all, electricity also costs, unless you happen to have solar and a battery, a luxury outside the price range of many.

And inflation hits everyone, as does all the other goods King Donald has threatened with wild-eyed abandon (sssh, don't mention the Trumpstein files) ...

But every so often the pond can't resist reminding the reptiles where their anti-renewables, wind turbine loathing (windmills if you King Donald will) crusade has got their hive mind cult followers, especially when this piece by Bill McKibben pops into view in The New Yorker ...

The Iran War Is Another Reason to Quit Oil
What if the drone is to warfare as the solar panel is to energy? (*archive link)

Inter alia ...

...Because drones are very cheap, you can make many thousands of them, and hide them anywhere. Smaller unmanned aircraft don’t need a military airstrip to launch. Drones and ballistic missiles can often be intercepted, but the U.S. and Israeli militaries are using expensive weaponry to do that job. Eventually, the gap between a fifty-thousand-dollar drone and a three-million-dollar interceptor becomes important; there were reports, this past weekend, that Israel had begun to run low on interceptors. In other words, inexpensive “small tech” is standing up to expensive high tech—and, over time, the former can seem to gain a kind of advantage.
Something similar may be playing out in the energy sector. America can only achieve its dream of “energy dominance” for as long as the world relies on the enormous and expensive machinery of the fossil-fuel industry: tankers, refineries, gas-fuelled power plants. Much of this infrastructure depends on U.S. companies—which is why Trump recently announced, with uncharacteristic candor, that he didn’t mind the spike in the cost of crude. “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote on Truth Social. Of course, the word “we” was doing a lot of work there. Big Oil makes money, and so do the parasitic politicians that the industry supports. The rest of us pay a lot of money. Gas is up nearly a buck since the war began.
And consumers have responded. In the first two weeks of the war, there has been a surge in the number of Americans looking to save money on energy—by asking for quotes on home solar systems and looking up electric vehicles online. We can expect similar trends in other countries. In India, where many kitchens depend on increasingly scarce and costly liquefied petroleum gas cylinders, consumers are racing to buy induction stoves. Many models are out of stock because restaurants have snatched them up; in the early days of the war, some Mumbai eateries shut their doors because they couldn’t find cooking gas and others stopped selling deep-fried or long-simmering foods because they required too much energy. Crematoria couldn’t find gas for their fires.

And so on ...

...Since the war in the Middle East began, a growing number of voices have been demanding that the U.K. reopen oil fields in the North Sea. But the problem with the “Drill, baby, drill” argument is that gas prices are set by global markets. The U.K. is unlikely to lower its own prices by extracting oil that it controls—and, anyway, it would take years for proposed oil wells to have an appreciable impact. “We’re a price taker, not a price maker,” the U.K.’s energy secretary, Ed Miliband, recently explained on BBC Sunday. Instead, he argued, “We need homegrown clean power that we control.”
Miliband was arguing that the U.K., like any nation, needs the energy equivalent of drones: solar panels, heat pumps, E.V.s, induction cooktops. We need the small tech that, in Miliband’s words, would let us get off the “fossil-fuel roller coaster.” The sickening effect of that roller-coaster ride was made clear in a new report from the Climate Change Committee, which advises the U.K. on its net-zero goals. It showed that coping with the last big energy price shock, from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, cost taxpayers more than forty-one billion pounds. If the U.K. invested a similar amount in homegrown clean energy, the committee found, it would get much of the way toward its net-zero goals. The best way to save Brits money—and to safeguard the country’s independence from tyrants as diverse as Vladimir Putin, Trump, and the mullahs of the Middle East—is to push ahead quickly toward a clean future.
China has already learned this lesson. As the Columbia scholars Erica Downs and Jason Bordoff wrote in Foreign Policy, recently, China has been preparing “for a world in which energy security is inseparable from geopolitics—by electrifying its economy, securing domestic sources of energy, amassing stockpiles, and dominating clean technology supply chains.” The good news is that none of these technologies are secrets, and we can buy them much more cheaply than we can buy oil. And, once we have them, we’ll no longer depend on the flow of oil through an indefensible, roughly twenty-one-mile-wide ditch. Instead, we’ll rely on a continuous stream of photons from the sun—an energy source that will last another five billion years. 

Sssh, don't mention the electrostate or the Trumpstein files.

Of course the reptiles will have none of that sort of talk, it's war mongering, coal and oil all the way in hive mind la la land, as the pond began the arduous task of winnowing out a few reptiles for weekend attention ...

First thing to note is the way the reptiles were on a "live" war footing, but early on the Saturday, the reptile updates seemed to have gone into slo mo ...

As for that Oz EXCLUSIVE?

EXCLUSIVE
Radical fuel crisis fix: use Russian oil
Australia faces importing more Russian-derived petrol as Middle East war disrupts global fuel supplies, with officials warning markets may take months to normalise.
By Greg Brown and Ben Packham

The reptiles were standing by, eager to help out Vlad the Sociopath:

Oh yes, everybody was eager to help King Donald ...

But the reptiles had the answer ...help out Vlad the sociopath:

The US temporarily eased sanctions on Russian crude shipments last week in a bid to drive down prices, opening the way for Asian refiners to use the oil, as India and China had continued to do. Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, said the US’s lifting of sanctions on Russian oil was aiding Vladimir Putin’s war effort and prolonging the conflict. He said if Australia imported more fuel derived from Russian oil, it should consider making a contribution to Ukraine’s energy fund, to help rebuild its crippled electricity infrastructure.
Australian Institute of Petroleum chief executive Malcolm Roberts said there was “a lot of uncommitted Russian crude accessible in our region” that could bolster refined fuel imports. “If we could get extra supply from anywhere that met fuel quality standards, that would be great,” he said. “We’re not going to do direct trade with Russia. But a lot of other countries … are choosing to look at whether they should bring some Russian cargoes in, since it’s there.”
Asked if motorists could expect rationing in the near future, Mr Roberts said it was a case of “wait and see”.

Moving along, the very best reptile minds were to hand to strategise and sort out the crisis, with the Ughmann in top form:

The header: Waiting for the ships that might not come: Australia’s self-inflicted fuel crisis: The latest Gulf war is a rude awakening, as the world of wishful thinking collides with the one we live in.

The caption for Frank's astonishing effort: We’re on a slow-moving tanker to a world of pain. Sources: iStock. Artwork by Frank Ling.

The Ughmann took a goodly six minutes for his victim blaming, victim shaming effort, beginning with that classic note in the header "self-inflicted fuel crisis".

Actually full credit to Faux Noise and King Donald and the United States gone wild-eyed and rogue for setting off this crisis.

Sure we could have set ourselves to the task of being full blown preppers, ready with kit for the madman appearing over the horizon, but credit where credit is due for the current crisis.

But before beginning the Ughmann torture, the pond would like to acknowledge Frank's astonishing piece of post-modernist art.

Only a genius could combine a bog standard snap of a tanker, with a vision of shards of yellow something cascading across a golden yellow setting or rising sun (how King Donald loves his gold!)

Who knows what it means but the sense of an impending apocalypse set the tone for the unreformed seminarian.

The Ughmann briefly forgot his endless war on renewables to indulge in a history lesson:

Few figures in history embody humanity’s maze of contradictions more starkly than German chemist Fritz Haber. He won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “making bread from air” and used the same skill to conjure poison gas and feed the machinery of war.
More than a million men were wounded by gas in World War I and it killed nearly 90,000.
Haber pioneered this diabolic slaughter in defiance of international agreements, overseeing the first large-scale use of chlorine gas on the Western Front at Ypres in 1915.
There was a personal toll. His wife, Clara, was also a chemist who was horrified by his work on chemical warfare. In the wake of his grim triumph at Ypres, she took his service pistol and shot herself.
Yet Haber also tackled one of humanity’s most enduring problems: famine.

Yep, a sure fire way to deal with the current crisis and King Donald is to drag up WWI, German chemist Fritz Haber.

The history lesson helped the Ughmann avoid any nasty talk of renewables...and get wildly excited about the wonders of plastics ... (that line in The Graduate clearly had a big impact)

The historic limit on crop yields was the availability of nitrogen. This essential element is abundant in the atmosphere but is locked in a form plants cannot use. Haber found a way to unlock it, forcing nitrogen to combine with hydrogen under heat and pressure to produce ammonia. The hydrogen comes from natural gas, which also provides the energy to drive the reaction.
The idea was industrialised by Carl Bosch and without the Haber-Bosch process billions would starve. Synthetic fertiliser cannot be made cheaply and at scale without fossil fuel. A century on, we still haven’t found a better way to feed the world.
In 2021 Sri Lanka conducted a demonstration of what not to do by banning chemical fertilisers in favour of organic farming. There followed the decimation of tea and rice crops, food shortages, soaring prices, riots, the resignation of the prime minister, a presidential apology and the abandonment of the fertiliser ban.
Synthetic fertiliser is just one example of where fossil fuel is buried so deep in the sinews of our civilisation that most people do not see it, just as most have no idea that the toothpaste they use and most of the medicines they take are petrochemical products. Oil is also the raw material for plastics, packaging, fabrics and thousands of other everyday products.
Politicians and activists talk as if energy systems can be easily unwound, but we are still bound to them in ways they barely understand. The modern world was built by fossil fuels, runs on them, and replacing them is not a choice we can simply will into existence. If it were easy, someone would already have done it.

The reptiles decided a couple of snaps of ships at sea would help, Oil tankers and ships line up in the Strait of Hormuz. Picture: AP Photo/Altaf Qadri

On with the Ughmann in a state of oil-deprivation shock:       

Civilisation’s root-and-branch dependence on the continuous flow of hydrocarbons is why nations reeled when the Strait of Hormuz was shut down and, with it, one-fifth of the planet’s supply of oil and gas. The latest Gulf war is a rude awakening as the world of wishful thinking collides with the one we live in. This is the real energy transition, from having abundant, invisible supply to a vivid and punishing awareness of what scarcity might bring.
Australia’s governments are now terrified as they stare into the abyss of the damage a liquid fuel shortage could deliver. Shaken from their sleepwalk, leaders are beginning to understand how profoundly exposed we are. More than 90 per cent of our total energy consumption still comes from coal, oil and gas. Jet fuel, petrol and diesel dominate that mix. Diesel matters most as it drives agriculture, mining and transport, and if it runs out the nation will grind to a halt.
Successive governments have manufactured this scarcity and there is little the incumbents can do at the 11th hour beyond praying that the arteries of supply from Asia are not cut.

Thank the long absent lord no one in the hive mind indulged in relentless crusading against renewables, eh Ughmann?, as the reptiles decided two more snaps were needed ... The Thailand-flagged cargo ship Mayuree Naree engulfed in black smoke in the Strait of Hormuz, after an attack by Iranian forces. Picture: AFP

Might a resilient renewables-driven economy have helped a little in withstanding the current shock, which will go on for months?

Forget it Jake, it's Ughmann town ...       

We sit at the end of long supply chains, and our energy security rests on an endless procession of ships ferrying oil, petrol, jet fuel and diesel. Every single day deliveries arrive on enormous, slow-moving tankers that creep across the oceans at a pace slower than a car edging through a school zone. Trips from refineries in Singapore and South Korea take between one to two weeks.
The major players in our market are Viva, Ampol, BP and Shell. Each has long-term contracts that secure these deliveries but Asian refineries cannot make fuel if they do not have oil. The risk is refineries run short of fuel to deliver and countries preference their own needs over exports. Talk of China halting shipments of jet fuel sent a shudder through our region.
The fuel shortage in regional Australia was triggered by its reliance on second-tier traders who get fuel from a spot market that dried up almost as soon as the first missile was fired at Iran. And it shouldn’t surprise politicians when some stampede to the bowsers to try to secure fuel when they wake up to the fact the government cannot guarantee it.
The longer the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and more damage is done to Middle Eastern oil infrastructure, the more pressure will build on refiners. The slow march of our fuel trade means there is a lag between a shock at the top of the supply chain and delivery to our market. If we hear of contracted cargoes not being loaded, it will signal that we are about to suffer real pain.
If the Albanese government gets that news, it will have to move to rationing well before our supplies begin to dwindle because we have so little fuel in reserve. There will be a hierarchy of priorities that will probably begin with supplying health and defence, then move to keeping the wheels of transport, agriculture and mining turning. Motorists present a big political problem because no government on Earth wants to suffer the consequences of what cutting their supply would mean. Our newly minted fuel tsar can do little beyond being a central point of contact in the crisis. We cannot distribute fuel we do not have.

What to do in a crisis? 

Well if you're the hive mind, you send in simpleton Sharri, Sky News host Sharri Markson says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese continues to claim there is no petrol supply issue, even as multiple Sydney service stations are running out of petrol. “Oil prices have topped $110 US a barrel - and multiple service stations are shut after running out of fuel,” Ms Markson said. “Yet Albanese continues to insist there's no supply issue and this is simply a case of panic buying.”

Panic suits the hive mind, and it certainly suits the apocalyptic Ughmann ...

For now, the supply ships are still sailing and one of the reasons we have cause to hope that will hold is because of our much-maligned trade in coal and liquefied natural gas. Our region relies on the fuels we ship to secure its energy security. We should be grateful that those who fight to end this trade have, so far, failed because if we undermine the security of those who make our liquid fuel, we cannot expect them to care about us.
Australia faces a witch’s brew of dilemmas, some beyond our control and others of our own making. The long-term danger is that we learn the wrong lessons from this crisis. The biggest mistake would be to believe there is a quick dismount from dependence on coal, oil and gas, and that electrifying everything will deliver energy security.
There seems to be a smug belief among electric vehicle owners that they will dodge any fuel crunch. That feeling may sour as their cars whirr on empty roads to deliver them first to empty supermarket shelves. There is no electric road train on the horizon that could swiftly replace our fleet of diesel trucks. The green hydrogen balloon has burst. There is no scalable replacement for making synthetic fertiliser or most of our medicine. We have yet to invent or scale up the industrial processes we will need to reach the mirage of a carbon-free world.

Oh that's gotta hurt. All those columns attacking renewables, and this incredibly smug and self-satisfied and complacent climate science denialist wants to have a go at EVs? And smug beliefs?

Does he realise his oil addiction actually might deliver him the apocalypse and rapture he so clearly wants?

Still no desire to wean himself off coal and oil? Still wants to suckle on the teat of ancient dinosaurs?

And then the Ughmann got around to the real cause of it all, King Donald ...

Our other dilemma is the American President. Remember all those stories fretting that Donald Trump was an isolationist? Would to God it was so. There is no ally on Earth that he has not insulted, few countries he hasn’t threatened, and the list of those he proposes to assault grows by the day. Cuba is the next cab off the rank.
Let’s list the Trump triumphs in the war against Iran so far. On the plus side of the ledger the despotic regime’s leadership has been culled and much of its war machinery damaged. But whoever believed it would fall or that the next supreme leader might not be worse than the last? And what is the incentive to stop fighting and open the Strait of Hormuz when Iran has demonstrated that is its nuclear option? The regime can now teach the world a lesson it will never forget, that an attack on Iran can shake every Western capital.

The reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, celebrating the "bring it all down" madness ... (sssh, don't mention the Trumpstein files) ... Former Navy SEAL and FBI special agent Jonathan Gilliam says US President Donald Trump threatened to “hit the oil infrastructure” on Kharg Island if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz US President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to announce that the United States “totally obliterated” military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island. Kharg Island is Iran’s largest export for sending oil to international markets.

At last the Ughmann seemed to become aware of all the damage that his kissing cousins at Faux Noise had helped create...

Continuing down the list of unintended, but not unexpected, consequences of this war, Iran is now selling more oil at a better price than before hostilities kicked off. Alarmed by rising prices at the pump in the US the Trump administration has eased restrictions on Russian oil. Moscow is raking in billions to help fund its war against Ukraine. China has been stockpiling oil for years in preparation for a potential conflict over Taiwan and Iran will continue to supply it as long as it can. Beijing is watching Washington exhaust its weapons inventories and shift assets from South Korea and Japan to the Gulf.
So, what does victory look like? How does Trump dismount? Marines are on their way to the Gulf. If the strait stays closed, they will be sent in and Tehran will have a single, narrow target on which to concentrate its fire.
If those forces move on Kharg Island, the terminal that handles most of Iran’s oil exports, they will be sitting on a hydrocarbon bomb. Would Iran’s mullahs hesitate to detonate it, sending body bags back to America and shockwaves through the global economy? Who can say
The only certainty is that one day Trump will declare victory as he walks away from this mess, and that he will be as deserving of a Nobel prize as Fritz Haber.

Sorry, there's another certainty. 

Faux Noise will walk away from this mess still treating it all as business as usual ...

At this point, the pond should note that cackling Claire was busy this weekend indulging in what has become a routine reptile jihad ...

When identity politics makes violence virtuous: Tame and the denial of October 7
A society that cannot name rape as rape because of the identity of the perpetrators has truly lost its bearings.
By Claire Lehmann
Contributor

The pond wouldn't have imbibed, just because this is is a wretched and pathetic jihad, but in any case the pond still has the bromancer and an epic "Ned" Everest natter to cover ...

The header: Oil crisis reveals a fat, dumb and lazy Australia; Donald Trump could achieve either victory or Armageddon in Iran. Australia is completely unprepared for either.

The caption for Emilia's feeble collage: Closing the Strait of Hormuz is relatively straightforward for Iran but causes huge global disruption; meanwhile, the destruction of the ayatollahs’ regime is not guaranteed. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

The bromancer took a goodly 5 minutes to indulge in his brand of victim shaming and blaming, but before the pond sets out on the slog, could it just record how disappointed it is in Emilia's artwork. 

After Frank's inspirational effort, the challenge was there, but Emilia comprehensively failed the bromancer and the hive mind.

Now on to the bromancer blaming us for not being prepared for what Faux Noise, via King Donald, has wrought on the world (sssh, don't mention the Trumpstein files):

Donald Trump’s war stands on the brink of strategic breakthrough, or strategic chaos, as the dangerous destruction of energy infrastructure this week demonstrates. The war has also revealed the staggering unfitness of Western nations for major warfare.
If the long-term legacy of Trump’s war in Iran is the end of the ayatollahs’ regime, the destruction of its nuclear program or even a long nuclear delay, it’s likely to be well regarded historically, no matter how messy it was. But those outcomes are not guaranteed.
Whatever happens from here, the world is looking at higher energy prices for a long time ahead. There’s surely a limit to how long US politics will allow Trump to pound Iran. So far there seems no limit to the willingness of Iran’s leaders to accept the death for themselves or the destruction of their society.

Ah, it's the unions ... Union power means Australian-flagged ships must have entirely Australian crews. That’s uneconomic so there are no such ships.

The bromancer was brimful with astonishing insights ...

Here’s something you perhaps hadn’t realised. Until now, both sides have been fighting within certain limits. The US has not targeted Iran’s energy infrastructure. Trump was furious that Israel attacked Iran’s biggest gas field, leading to Iran attacking Qatar’s gas and other regional energy infrastructure. US and Israeli purpose diverged sharply.
Washington hasn’t hit Iran’s energy infrastructure for three reasons. It wants a post-ayatollah regime to be able to rebuild. It doesn’t want to take energy capacity out of the global system. But most importantly, Iran has desperate, perhaps devastating, things it hasn’t yet done but could do.
If you offer Tehran Armageddon, it might give you Armageddon in return. Closing the Strait of Hormuz is relatively straightforward for Iran but causes huge global disruption. However, if Iran systematically hits Gulf Arab energy infrastructure this could create energy chaos on a far bigger scale. Worse, if it systematically strikes the region’s desalination plants it could cause a fantastic humanitarian crisis.
It has also threatened to set fire to oil reserves. Iraqi forces retreating from Kuwait in 1991 set fire to 600 oil wells. This took months to bring under control. The Iranians could do much, much worse. The Iranians have no incentive to surrender. They don’t mind death through martyrdom, but not through surrender. That makes them particularly dangerous.
Iranian leaders have every incentive to keep inflicting asymmetric cost, and therefore asserting asymmetric deterrence, on the US and Israel and their friends for as long as they can. It’s difficult to imagine how US-led forces can re-open the Strait of Hormuz while Iran retains any state capacity at all. The distance of ships to the shore is just too small.

The reptiles decided this was the right moment to introduce King Donald ... but lest the sight disturb the hive mind, the reptiles offered only a back view ... U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday (March 19) he had told Israel not to repeat its attacks on Iranian natural gas infrastructure as tit-for-tat strikes on energy plants sent energy prices spiralling, sharply escalating the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Alex Cohen produced this report.

Heck, couldn't we at least see the team at work?

Oh that kegsbreath, what a card he is.

It was only a matter of time before the bromancer turned to his favourite topic ... the war on China by Xmas ...

It was similarly impossible, 15 years ago, to provide security for civilian ships that got too close to Somalia. A fast, small boat loaded with pirates could take over almost any non-military ship.
It was similarly impossible, 15 years ago, to provide security for civilian ships that got too close to Somalia. A fast, small boat loaded with pirates could take over almost any non-military ship. (sic, perhaps the reptiles repeated the line for emphasis, or perhaps because someone nodded off, but the pond does like to give a feel for what it's like reading the reptiles early in the morning).

There’s another lens we must view this war through and, when contemplating a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan, it’s deeply disturbing for America, and all Western nations, though no Western nation is less prepared than Australia.
According to CNN, the US used a quarter of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defence missile interceptors in the short war with Iran last June. This time, in a move that should desperately concern Australians, it has taken THAAD systems out of South Korea to deploy in the Iran conflict. According to Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in 2025 the US fired 20 per cent of its SM-3 missile interceptors.
The US is the super heavyweight champion of the world, yet it’s exhausting itself against Iran, a middleweight. According to the Centre for a New American Security, “the US has never had sufficient (weapons) stockpiles for a high-intensity fight with a near-peer adversary like China”.
Yet we’re now entering the period of peak vulnerability for a Chinese attack on Taiwan, with all that would mean for us. Tom Corben of the US Studies Centre produced a useful paper demonstrating how radically short of replacement level US production of key weapons is.

What do do? How about a snap of a ship? A cargo ship sails in the Arabian Gulf towards Strait of Hormuz in United Arab Emirates last Sunday. Picture: AP

The bro turned to considering his kit, and as always, as Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches, there was no way he could be happy ...

The US, he records, produces about 90 Tomahawk land attack missiles a year, it needs to produce 1000. It produces about 1200 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles of the type we’ve donated to the United Arab Emirates but needs to make 1900. It produces 600 Patriot interceptor missiles a year but needs 2000.
While US stockpile levels are classified, as are precise usage numbers in Iran, it’s clear the US is producing many thousands short of replacement levels. Planned increases will be years coming. Even under Trump, the US hasn’t invested sufficiently in its arsenal. Shyam Sankar, in his important book Mobilize, argues the US won world wars mainly because of its huge industrial base. Now, like Western Europe, it has dangerously deindustrialised. And in deindustrialising, the West, compared with China, is effectively disarming.
Australia is in the worst shape. Australia ranks a shocking, dismal 74th on the Harvard Economic Complexity Index.

The reptiles flung another AV distraction into the breach ... Iran maintains a substantial stockpile of short and medium-range ballistic missiles capable of striking targets across the Middle East and reaching parts of Europe. Key US military installations in the region, including the Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, are within range and could be potential targets in any retaliation. The Strait of Hormuz remains a strategic flashpoint, with any disruption threatening global energy supplies, while Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen could also play a role in widening the conflict. The situation unfolds amid ongoing tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and recent US strikes on Iranian facilities, further heightening instability across the region.

The bromancer was also hooked on the teat of long ago pulped dinosaurs ...

Our oil deliveries have arrived on schedule so far but we have no capacity to withstand any prolonged energy supply disruption. Before he was first elected Prime Minister in 2022, Anthony Albanese promised in speeches (and incidentally in an interview with me) to establish a “strategic fleet” – namely a merchant fleet. But according to Peter Court, an authoritative maritime consultant, there are now zero international trading vessels under an Australian flag.
This is a critical capability gap because a government can requisition in an emergency – for example, to transport oil – only ships that travel under its flag. There are only nine such Australian vessels. These are mainly passenger ships operating between the mainland and Tasmania or odd specialist vessels supplying Antarctic missions and the like.
This is a model for everything else the Albanese government has conspicuously failed to do in national security. It identified the problem, talked big, delivered nothing. Union power means Australian-flagged ships must have entirely Australian crews. That’s uneconomic so there are no such ships. The government’s strategic fleet plans were pathetically reduced to a tender for three trial vessels. Four years after the first promise, nothing has been heard of this for months.

There came a snap designed to terrify the bro, A Chinese J-15 fighter jet landing on the deck of the Liaoning aircraft carrier during military drills. Picture: AFP / STR

And so to the final gobbet:

Remember Albanese’s earnest pledge before the last election to take back ownership of the Port of Darwin? Zilch. Almost nothing the Albanese government says about national security is believable or consequential.
Many failures have been bipartisan. It was a catastrophic mistake to get rid of the car industry. We have almost no advanced manufacturing, nor can this be resurrected through a few Dreamtime defence projects alone.
We lazily run a trade surplus on commodities and overspend the revenue. As a nation we’re fat, lazy and dumb.
Opposition industry spokesman Andrew Hastie wants to rebuild advanced manufacturing. He says: “A key input for manufacturing is energy. But Labor’s Future Made in Australia is all about net zero and decarbonisation. As long as we’re bound by the net-zero straitjacket we won’t revive manufacturing. (It) relies on cheap baseload power, advanced robotics, AI and cutting-edge processes.”
Hastie’s right. But his side of politics is also responsible for today’s mess, with 99 per cent of our trade carried by sea, a pitiful few weeks’ fuel reserve, no merchant fleet and a vacuum in most areas of critical capability.
We could end up an unexpected but major victim of the Iran conflict and its fallout.

Um, we could end up a major victim of Faux Noise and its MAGA pet, but relax, due consideration is being given to all the important matters under some kind of threat..

And so to "Ned" .... and here the pond should begin by noting that the reptiles thought this a matter of major importance, so much so that they splashed "Ned" across the top of the digital edition. 

Top of the reptile world, ma...

What a disappointment was to follow, in a way only "Ned"can manage, wringing hands while shouting at clouds ...

The header: The Albanese government now faces the most important six weeks of its life: The PM and his Treasurer have a big decision to make about how to govern in this moment — and must not waste this crisis.

The caption for another disappointing Emilia effort: While Anthony Albanese faces a big call, Jim Chalmers is raising expectations as much as he dares – yet he is putting his authority as Treasurer on the line. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella.

Oh Emilia, Emilia, you've done it again.

We're about to embark on an excruciating, almost unendurable ten minute Everest climb with "Ned" and you send us off with that pitiful collage?

As for that header and the instruction, "must not waste this crisis", with the implication that somehow this gigantic mess might be fixed in the next six weeks or so?

Sssh, don't tell the reptiles this crisis is going to run for months, and whatever you do, don't mention the Trumpstein files.

"Ned", together with the hive mind, doesn't have a clue, and must waste a whole word salad delivering said cluelessness ...

Australia has been caught out by the erupting global energy and inflation crisis. Our interest rate settings, our national budget, our weak fuel reserves and our poor productivity mean the nation is exposed by global shocks of a devastating but unpredictable dimension.
The Albanese government now faces the most important six weeks in its life. In the budget deliberations it must decide whether to reset its ambitions and its economic policy or hunker down on a more modest “steady as she goes” resilience agenda to dodge the electoral risks of big reform.
The public remarks this week from Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese, with their different emphasis, are akin to the private debate about Australia’s economic future spilling into the public arena. The moment of policy truth is approaching.
Chalmers is raising expectations as much as he dares – yet he is putting his authority as Treasurer on the line. He warns the global energy crisis from the Iranian war is “extremely serious and potentially enduring”. He recruits the crisis to drive a more ambitious budget, his central argument being that war in the Middle East must “reinforce”, not “replace”, the imperative for reform. “We will make hard decisions in May,” Chalmers pledges. But does the Prime Minister agree?
A more troubled future for the Australian people
In the process Chalmers is more open than before about our national risks: inflation “already too high” before the war is likely to rise past 5 per cent; productivity growth – the key to living standards – has been “too weak for two decades” and will take far longer to return to trend; while capacity constraints are locking the nation into disappointing GDP growth of about 2 per cent.
In his Melbourne speech on Thursday previewing the budget, Chalmers said it would contain a government savings package, a productivity and investment package and a tax package. In effect, a troika of reforms.

Jimbo turned up as a distraction ... Treasurer Jim Chalmers has addressed concerns about a potential recession following the Reserve Bank’s latest rate hike, which takes the cash rate to 4.1 per cent.

"Ned" sounded traumatised...

At the same time, he revealed the government’s 1.2 per cent productivity growth target will take five years to reach, not the hoped-for two years. And overall economic growth is now likely to be a quarter to half a percentage point weaker in the middle years of the forward estimates. This is a higher cost, lower growth, rising interest rates, more troubled future for the Australian people during the Albanese government’s second term.
If realised, such hardship will accentuate public disillusion with established politics and probably assist the Pauline Hanson party that feeds on grievance while bankrupt when it comes to worthwhile policy to address the nation’s challenges.
The situation demands a reform-based economic policy reset where Labor enjoys a centre-left majority in the federal parliament. Chalmers doesn’t duplicate the dramatics of Paul Keating – recall the “banana republic” where Keating would strike out ahead and lock in the rest.
The big question is how Albanese and the cabinet colleagues feel about a dose of reform with the public hurting from rising inflation, higher fuel costs and shortages, rising interest rates and mounting political scepticism about both Labor and the Coalition.
The dilemma facing the government
The politics may ruin Chalmers’ ambitions. As the government’s four-year anniversary looms, at stake is Chalmers’ claim to conviction as Treasurer along with the authority he actually possesses at the cabinet table.
Assessing the dilemma facing the government, economist Chris Richardson told Inquirer: “In the next period the good policy opportunity is probably as great as anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. This is because we have failed to address a whole bunch of chronic problems, and now we face an immediate challenge.
“The opportunity to act on good policy is high as one side of politics is essentially in flames. But if you see your main role in life as fighting Tories, you might prefer the good politics of not doing much, handing out some Band-Aids, doing things like the capital gains tax reform that is essentially promised, basically staying a small target and keeping as much attention as possible on your opponent in the hope that you can effectively wipe them off the map.”

The reptiles followed up with an image of doom, An oil tanker burns after being hit by an Iranian strike in the ship-to-ship transfer zone at Khor al-Zubair port near Basra, Iraq, (sic, why use a full stop when a comma will do?)

Blather followed:

Albanese’s caution on reform is proven, but this week he offered his own prescription on the budget. It overlaps to an extent with Chalmers’ but the differences cannot be missed.
Significantly, Albanese also wants to seize the moment. His message: it’s self-reliance, economic resilience and making more things in Australia, an intensification of his existing Future Made in Australia agenda.
Albanese said: “For Australia to compete, succeed and prosper in this decade, we have to upgrade to a new economic model. We want to make sure that we do everything we can to shield the Australian economy, households and businesses from the worst of global uncertainty. That will be a focus of the budget, but we won’t be waiting until the budget.”

At this point the reptiles introduced a significant stylistic flourish, and eager as always to recreate the reptile experience, the pond thought it was best to revert to the original ...

What did the indentation and italics mean? 

The pond grew a tad weary wondering, but abandoned the futility inherent in the task to press on with the climb ...

After the supply-side message arising from Covid, Albanese now nominates fuel reserves, expanding manufacturing, critical minerals, digital and the tech sector. But this merely looks like more of the same from Labor. More of the same doesn’t cut it, notably if it’s about “shielding” our households and businesses. Economic resilience is a necessity, but seeking higher growth via supply chain resilience won’t work unless tied to productivity improvements.
Assessing the story of the Albanese government, Richardson said: “So far, they haven’t fought the productivity fight, they haven’t fought the budgetary fight, they took temporary windfalls and made permanent promises. We are not as a nation prepared for this situation, not the economy, the budget, the central bank, the government or the strategic oil reserves.”
Reflecting on the history of relations between prime ministers and treasurers, Richardson said: “It’s the prime minister’s view that will win the day.” Chalmers’ rhetorical message is correct: “All this economic uncertainty and volatility is a reason for more reform, not less. A supply-side strategy to lift the speed limit of the economy and make it more resilient. So we can sustain stronger growth without adding to inflation.” Unsurprisingly, he said: “I am confident that there is appetite in our team now.” We shall see.
The imperative for sovereignty
There is a framing fusion that could work for both Albanese and Chalmers – it is the imperative for sovereignty in today’s world. That means both more economic resilience and a higher performing productivity-driven economy. But delivering this is probably beyond Labor’s vision or capabilities.

The reptiles again interrupted with a geography lesson some gif style animation, with this the finished look ...

The pond skipped past the next few lines ...

The current crisis looms as the defining event that determines whether Labor can govern successfully by meeting the demands of the times. The risk is it remains locked in the politics of big spending (with spending as a portion of GDP now touching a high of 27 per cent of GDP), universal social programs (with childcare the next looming blunder), excessive taxation on individuals and corporations, unsustainably high overseas net migration, anti-productivity regulation of the industrial relations system and an addiction to red and green tape.
By raising expectations, Chalmers invites decisive budget judgment on the Albanese government. He says the government is working on “substantial savings options”. He talks up “substantial” productivity gains through investment, faster approvals, greater competition and capturing the upsides of artificial intelligence. He admits the tax system is “outdated”, pledges greater tax reform but is weaker on detail.
The Australian people, meanwhile, have not been helped by the ineptitude of Donald Trump and the misjudgments of the Reserve Bank.

... because the pond wanted to get to this classic Neddism:

President Trump is indirectly responsible for much of the pain being inflicted on the Australian public.

Roll that around on the tongue, savour the feel, enjoy the taste on the back palate ...

President Trump is indirectly responsible

The pond took that as classic reptile avoidance, what with Faux Noise and News Corp having been directly responsible for helping foist King Donald on the world, and King Donald, whether by tariffs, by berating allies ("cowards"), by supporting Vlad the sociopath, or by embarking on sundry ventures and excursions, being directly responsible for the current mess.

No indirectly needed, or required.

Carry on Nedding ...

.. He was an irresponsible instigator of the Iran war having made no proper, prior assessment of the regime’s ability to block the Strait of Hormuz, thereby creating a global energy crisis that damages most of the global economy including Australia.
Trump’s related blunder was to announce regime change as his goal, thereby telling the mullahs they were fighting for their survival and driving them to measures of desperation and chaos.
Chalmers has unveiled Treasury modelling scenarios involving short-term and more serious long-term projections stemming from the closure of the strait. The more long-term had the oil price going to $120 a barrel and taking three years to return to its pre-conflict price. In this scenario GDP would be 0.6 per cent lower in 2027 and even by 2029 would be below where it would have been without the conflict. Warning: the pain from the energy shock might be protracted. The risk is higher interest rates to combat higher inflation.

Not being able to blame King Donald, "Ned" was forced to look to others to blame... RBA Governor Michele Bullock. bank’s mistake has arisen from noble motive. Picture: NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

What a relief ... it's a bloody useless woman, always useful to have around when you want to blame someone for being bloody useless:

Misreading the economy
The Reserve Bank’s decision this week to lift the cash rate to 4.1 per cent – the second increase in successive months – testifies to its misreading of the economy over the past two years and raises questions about the operation of the new central bank model. Governor, Michele Bullock, made clear this increase was about domestic inflation, not the war impact. That still lies ahead.
Rates are now just below their 4.35 per cent at the peak of the fighting inflation cycle. The implication is hard to miss – the bank failed to raise rates sufficiently high on the upward cycle and cut them too far on the way down. The statement by the bank monetary policy board reflected concern about “inflation expectations” – that inflation will get embedded in pricing decisions – and warned of a “material risk” that inflation will remain above the target for longer than previously anticipated.
The bank’s mistake has arisen from noble motives – it wanted to control inflation with the least possible damage to the employment market. But in the process it failed on the main job – curbing inflation – and it will be judged accordingly.
In her media conference Bullock seemed anxious to reclaim the bank’s inflation-fighting credibil­ity. She issued a hawkish warning that the bank would pursue inflation with future interest rate increases to the point of a recession if necessary. Neither the government nor the bank wants or is predicting a recession. But the bank needs to convince markets and businesses that it will adopt a more committed outlook combating inflation in the world of energy shortages.
It is also tempting to see in Bullock’s remarks that she wants help from the government. As governor she has made the mistake of dodging comments on government fiscal and spending policies when those policies obviously affect the bank’s decisions. Nobody expects her to criticise the government but projecting excessive timidity is equally unwise.
A related problem is the 5-4 split vote on the rate increase suggesting serious division on the board despite Bullock’s insistence it was about timing, not direction. This was a highly sensitive decision and a split vote of this magnitude cannot help the bank’s authority. Was the bank’s advice to the board inadequate and unpersuasive? Did no board member feel the need to display solidarity around this decision? What does this say about future monetary policy decisions and the effective operation of the new Reserve Bank model?
Have no doubt, the bank will now face even more intense scrutiny. How smart was it to change the model and publicise the internal vote? Can you imagine the havoc if federal cabinet released the details of split votes on the rare occasions when they occur? That would be absurd and manifestly counter-productive.
Global shock

EQ Economics chief Warren Hogan told Inquirer: “The sadness is that 10 central banks are meeting and none will raise interest rates. Ideally, you do not raise rates when you have such a severe shock globally. Central banks should be able to look through such oil price shocks. The irony is that the bank got itself into this position because it refused to take out insurance for any upside on inflation or surprise event.

This being "Ned", how could the reptiles resist inserting yet another a geography lesson?

That set "Ned" off on his final gobbet, but buckle up the Everest summit is to hand ...

“We are probably the most household-indebted country in the world with floating interest rates. It’s an easy story for the media and others to jump on and it means the bank is fighting a broad political battle most of the time. I think the review of the bank clearly hasn’t improved things at all, doing monetary policy by committee.
“Ian Macfarlane and Glenn Stevens would feel the economy in their bones. You need that sixth sense. We have people sitting at the top of the RBA who are great Australians but we’ve come up a bit short and we’re getting ourselves into trouble.
“If we get this wrong, if inflation gets away from us, the costs are measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, they’re not small. The best thing you can do for the people of Australia is to keep inflation under control.”
Addressing the reform agenda, Richardson said urgent changes were needed to both the spending and taxation side of the budget: “Our spending and our taxes are littered with errors. If we improved both sides of the budget that would be a massive win.” He calculated the government was spending about $75bn a year more than a few years ago as a proportion of GDP.
He said: “We used to be known internationally for the targeting of welfare, we gave money to people who needed it and we didn’t give money to people who didn’t need it. But that’s changed because of the politics – electricity subsidies to everyone, a shift in childcare subsidies, look at the NDIS, the increases in Medicare spending goes to doctors rather than patients.”
Albanese is deeply attached to the idea of universal social benefits, a far cry from the ALP emphasis on equity via means testing during the 1980s. But how do universal benefits square with a decade of budget deficits and a public sector that increases economic demand when supply capacity is too constrained, leading to inflation?
The home battery subsidy scheme has been a fiasco. The West Australian GST deal is a huge political gift largely devoid of policy gain. On tax, a litany of reforms is needed. Personal income tax and corporate tax are too high while capital is taxed too lightly. If Labor decides cutting the capital gains tax discount is the full extent of its budget tax reform, it will invite ridicule.
Richardson said: “Going back to the Prime Minister’s phrase, if you are going to be the natural party of government then at some stage you must act like that.
“At some point, you have to do the good policy.”

Put it another way. 

At some point, you have to 'fess up to the dismal failures of Faux Noise and News Corp, because thanks to their preferred President, good policy has suddenly turned into a marathon descent into madness.

And finally, for those who survived the "Ned" experience, and made it to the bitter end, a soupçon of News Corp fun, found in another place, and in the intermittent archive ...

One year ago, News Corp columnist Rita Panahi used her Sky News platform to label Gina Rinehart’s estranged son, John Hancock, a “man-child” and “spoiled brat with a chronic case of entitlement”.
He did not respond. But on Wednesday, Hancock, who lives overseas to give his family some distance from his Australian legal entanglements, found a golden opportunity.
This masthead had reported on Panahi’s 50th birthday party on a $25,000-a-day boat floating off the Florida coast, which one guest said was hosted by Rinehart.
“This ‘journalist’ calling me a ‘spoiled brat’ appears to have celebrated her 50th onboard a boat funded by Gina, complete with a ‘present table’, and wearing the hat after months of singing from Gina’s PR flacks’ songbook,” Hancock told On Background.
“In contrast, I pay for my own boat and parties with money I’ve earned – not Gina’s, the origins of which are currently before the courts.
“Australians have a great radar for irony – here it writes itself.”

The pond knows that Rita, meter maid, has a cult following amongst pond correspondents, and this after dinner mint treatwas up there with the venerable Meade noting that John Lyons had once worked for the lizard Oz ...

... in a reference to One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s extensive use of Rinehart’s private plane, Hancock questioned whether it was just the boat party that appeared to have been gifted to the Sky News host.
“Did Gina also pay for the flights? Was it on the company jet? And what further personal comments are expected in return?” he asked.
News Corp’s standards of business conduct state no employee should accept gifts or hospitality unless they have a business purpose and are “clearly appropriate in the context of a reasonable business relationship”.
Staff should also “refuse or return any gift, even a minor one, which appears to be given for the purpose of or with an expectation of reward or influence”.
Panahi, News Corp, Sky, Sky CEO Paul Whittaker, Herald Sun editor Sam Weir and representatives for Rinehart were all approached for comment. None responded.
The attention has not stopped Panahi pronouncing on propriety in the media. On Thursday, she was taking aim at the “pile-on” by reporters and commentators who covered the Hawthorn racism saga in 2022, saying they had “abandoned any pretence of fairness” and should “feel eternal shame”.
Uh-huh, but aren’t there some questions for Panahi on ethics a bit closer to home?

And with that, now this ...

A final bit of jocularity featuring James, the UK Terror, the Beeb and King Donald ...

In which Our Henry and Kllernomics disappoint so the pond tries to flood the zone with distractions ...

 

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...

...As for the current war, one is reminded of a passage from Churchill’s lively and instructive memoir of his first three decades, My Early Life. He recalls the great confidence British officials had prior to the Boer war in 1899. Looking back from 1930, Churchill writes,
"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 ...

Who knew Bill Kristol had such a flair for satire?
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...

...let’s take this occasion to review Kristol’s record on Iraq, courtesy of a rather cursory Nexis search. It holds no surprises.
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?

...I believe-
That ancient Jews built boats and sailed
to America.
I am a Mormon.
And a Mormon just believes.

I believe-
That plan involves
Me getting my own planet.

I believe!!!
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!!

I believe!
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:

Jurgen Habermas spent decades arguing that modern democracy had the resources to save itself. By the time he died last week, aged 95, he had concluded that those resources were collapsing.
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:

Crucial in that dissolution are the echo chambers – less because their inhabitants see more of what they already believe than because they stop encountering views that genuinely surprise or radically challenge them. Without real otherness, there is no real argument, only endless amplification of entrenched beliefs. The shared world that democratic discourse requires shatters into hermetic fragments.
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.

With Habermas, a whole culture of the serious left draws to a close. Those of us who spent decades grappling with it are the losers too. The greatest curse, Mill warned, is stupid opponents: ones who never force you to sharpen your wits. Habermas, ever faithful to Kant’s motto – “Dare to Know!” – always did. May he rest in peace.

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:

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed,” is commonly attributed to Mark Twain. Whatever its provenance, it’s wholly accurate when it comes to the breathless nonsense that accompanies any change in official rates by the Reserve Bank, or any other central bank for that matter.
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.

The reverence accorded official pronouncements is similarly laughable. Since 2012 Australia’s trimmed mean inflation, the one the RBA supposedly cares most about, has been outside the already quite wide 2-3 per cent inflation target for almost nine years, or more than 60 per cent of the time.
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 ...

At least Killer managed to work Covid into his yarn, though he failed to mention masks or vaccines ...

And all these were published after governments had pumped Covid stimulus into their economies. Indeed, they were made after inflation had already begun to rise rapidly, and they occurred well before Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022.
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.

RBA board no place for conflict of political interest
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.

Evil Islamic regime posed existential threat to free world
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...

Trump Is Betraying Iran’s Pro-Democracy Protesters

He toyed with their hopes, raising expectations he never meant to fulfill. (*archive link)

And so on, and while there, follow the link to ...

Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done
Allied leaders know that any positive gesture they make will count for nothing. (*archive link)

Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.
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 ...

Putin Henchman Tossed in Psych Hospital After Shocking Plea to Russians
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!

And I believe that God invented Western Civilisation for the good of all
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 ...