In which the bromancer and ancient Troy tackle the state of the orange emperor's empire ...

 

The pond has long thought that complete shamelessness, chutzpah, and an inclination to a certain kind of insolent cheekiness are prerequisites for the practice of politics, and the thought came again with this yarn near the top of the lizard Oz this morning ...

STOCKPILE PLEDGE
Fuel fracas: ‘fill ’er up to 60 days’, Coalition vows (intermittent archive link)
Coalition vows to double reserves to 60 days
Angus Taylor has pledged an $800m plan to double Australia’s fuel reserves while Foreign Minister Penny Wong embarks on Asian diplomatic mission to secure shipments.
By Ben Packham and Geoff Chambers

This is, of course, the man who not so long ago decided that Australia's fuel reserves were best stored in the United States... from March, 2020: U.S. And Australia Strengthen Fuel Security With New SPR Arrangement

Part of the process is the expectation that - unlike elephants - punters will always forget, or perhaps not have cared in the first place ...

To be fair to Dame Groan, unlike the remarkably stupid and wildly oscillating beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, she's always been consistent. 

She's always been a climate science denialist, she's always been a devotee of fossil fuels, of oil and gas, so her piece this day is just business as usual.

The header: Making the case for more refineries at time of crisis; We have been given a warning about our reliance on overseas sources for our liquid fuels and the totally inadequate level of our reserves. It would be negligent to ignore this warning.

The caption for the snap which got Dame Groan wildly excited: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen during a visit to the Ampol Lytton refinery in Brisbane. Picture: NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

You can make the case for the electrostate and renewables and such like as much as you like, but this Dame is not for turning. Never has been, never will be ...

It was quite the turn-up for the books but the photograph of Anthony Albanese and Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen standing in front of one of the last two oil refineries was indic­a­tive of a change of heart, if not panic, on the government’s part.
It was only a few months ago at the UN Climate Change 30th Conference of the Parties in Brazil that Australia was championing a proposal to phase out fossil fuels. Just this week there is a follow-up conference in Colombia to flesh out the details. Plenty of countries will be attending, but there are some notable absentees including the US, India and China – all the big emitters, in other words.

How she loves to dance on the grave of the planet, how she thrives in the hothouse of carbon dioxide emissions ... Bowen and the PM have been trying to secure an increase in the supply of liquid fuels. Picture: News Wire/Thomas Lisson

This is of course just what her cult followers expect and demand ...

Back at home, Bowen has had to face the reality of a potential shortage of liquid fuels: diesel, petrol, aviation gas. Forget all that stuff about fossil fuels being the enemy.
The Prime Minister and Bowen have been working hard to achieve an increase in the supply of liquid fuels, even if the incremental additions secured thus far are relatively trivial: a few days’ extra supply.
We also are not being told the cost of the fuel carried by these additional tankers heading our way.
While the fuel situation may appear to have improved temporarily with a fall in bowser prices, the government is aware of the dangers that may emerge in the coming months. When the conflict in the Middle East began, there was a record number of oil tankers on the water. These have now mainly reached their destinations.
With the restrictions on passage through the Strait of Hormuz – it previously had handled around 20 per cent of the flow of global fuel supplies – these flows have become severely hampered. It is estimated that only about 10 per cent of the tankers that normally sail through the strait are now doing so.

Token riff raff who take a view apart from the Dame should make ready to be demonised - fires waiting to happen ... Albanese, Bowen and Deputy PM Richard Marles at the Viva Energy refinery after a fire there. Picture: NewsWire / Josie Hayden

Expecting Dame Groan to double down in her denialism? Make that a triple ...

The refineries in Asia are likely to run short of crude oil to be refined in the coming weeks. This will have flow-on effects for Australia since most of our liquid fuels were sourced from Asia. Hence, the government’s desperate attempt to diversify the sources of our supply.
Not surprisingly, Bowen hasn’t been prepared to give up entirely on his dreams of decarbonisation, bragging about the current progress of the rollout of renewable energy.
But he realises that electrification is not a short-term solution, and only a partial one at that. He also reluctantly has come to acknowledge the critical role gas must play in the electricity system.
Many voters must be scratching their heads, wondering how we got to where we are. How did eight refineries become two? How could it be that we produced enough oil for our needs a quarter of century ago and now produce less than 20 per cent? On what basis was the minimum fuel reserves recommended by the International Energy Agency of 90 days rejected?
There are a variety of reasons for the closure of the refineries, foremost among them that they couldn’t return a consistent profit. Our refineries are old; some were constructed partly based on the need to shore up national security; they are at the end of the line. They are also sub-scale, judged by the modern refineries constructed more recently in other parts of the world.
The new fuel standards imposed on them – sulphur content, for instance – would require substantial capital investment by the refineries that simply could not be justified. Add that the amount of local crude oil has been dropping and bizarre industrial relations arrangements, and closure of all the refineries was all but guaranteed.
Had it not been for the actions of the Coalition government, the refineries in Geelong and Brisbane also would have closed.

Here the reptiles slipped in Sky Noise down under (what, still no rebrand?), with the pond's only note to wonder why caps were deployed to describe a "Cane Farmer". 

A new trend, inspired by Kind Donald's truthing ways?

Cane Farmer Owen Menkens says farmers are “worried about the future” with the fuel crisis impacting Australia. Mr Menkens told Sky News Australia that there are “inflationary pressures” also adding to stress for farmers. “And then there’s the fear of not being able to get fuel and fertiliser, which is really probably the scariest bit of it all.”

You can't expect Sky Noise or the reptiles of Oz to get agitated about what's actually caused, and is continuing to cause the crisis.

It provides too much in the way of cudgels with which to thump comrade Albo.

A prevert might succumb to the temptation to wish ill on Dame Groan's descendants as the planet heats up and expires, but that's to consign everybody else to the same fate.

Instead it's best just to politely nod and plough through the denialism to the bitter end of her new drill, baby, drill program, incidentally putting her at one with King Donald's desire to ruin the planet..

The Labor government has committed to continuing this support and has relaxed the fuel standards in the meantime. (Bowen had proudly brought forward the new sulphur standard but has been forced to reverse this decision.)
Bowen has now declared there is no need for another refinery, although he has not ruled out extensions to the remaining ones.
This is surely a premature stance to take, given the number of moving parts that will be needed to accommodate a policy that grows our domestic liquid fuel reliance. This must include facilitation of the exploration and exploitation of oil, onshore and offshore.
Much is being made of the potential of the Taroom Trough, which is part of the Bowen-Surat hydrocarbon basin in southwest Queensland.
While it’s unclear just how much oil there is, it’s surely the time when risks must be taken to restart our oil program.
There are other prospective areas including in the North West Shelf, the Beetaloo Basin and the Great Australian Bight. Recall that 50 years ago some experts were telling anyone who would listen that there was no exploitable oil or gas left in the North Sea. They were wrong.
On the face of it, the government seems flexible in using existing programs to facilitate the resurgence of a local oil industry. However, some legislative impediments such as the veto on funding pipelines in some programs will need to be removed.
One viable option is the construction of a new refinery at Gladstone, which would be close to several large-scale industrial operations.
There is a suitable port and there are other reasons this would make sense. Should the Taroom Trough work out, for instance, this refinery could be used to convert the crude.
It also should be possible to use imported heavy crude to produce diesel, which is critical to many Queensland economic activities, including agriculture, mining and metal processing.
To be sure, the cost of a new refinery is substantial – about $10bn to $12bn – and many components would need to be shipped in modular form from Asia. It would require the services of a major global engineering group when there is already heavy demand.
We are not the only country waking up to the weakness in their liquid fuel position and considering options such as new refineries. We need to get in the queue soon lest this option vanish into the distant future.
The real danger is the government will revert to type should the Middle East conflict be resolved in the near term and the strait reopened for traffic.
As unlikely as this scenario is, there are still powerful anti-fossil fuel influences on the government likely to re-emerge from the wings of the political stage.
We have been given a warning about our reliance on overseas sources for our liquid fuels and the totally inadequate level of our reserves. It would be negligent to ignore this warning.

Speaking of King Donald ...

 

Those 'toons are by way of introducing the bromancer, out and about this day, and picking up on the assassination attempt.

Yesterday the pond did its level best to ignore the Lynch mob, but the pond can never ignore the bromancer in all his glory ...

The header: In an age of narcissism and violence we need true physical courage more than ever; While we celebrate Anzac heroes, a Washington shooting incident exposes our contradictory attitudes toward the warriors who keep us safe from everyday violence.

The caption for the snap of the carry on: US Secret Service agents surround President Donald Trump after a shooting incident outside the ballroom during the White House Correspondents Dinner. Picture: AP

On the upside, the bromancer can't scribble one of those "I was there and was completely unnerved" yarns that have been littering the ether in recent times.

With due regard for the correspondents who might have actually reported from war zones, the rest of the bunch might actually write more useful pieces if they did a little cross dressing, and went as schoolgirls into current war zones in Ukraine, Lebanon, Gaza, or Iran - or any American school, where the chances of actually getting taken out by gun violence are pretty high.

On the downside, the bromancer felt the need to begin with an Orwell quote, yet another example of the mangling of Orwell ...

“Those who abjure violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.”
– George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945

If only the bromancer had bothered to check, what with those notes being freely available online ...

Context always provides a slightly different resonance, and the pond wishes it could spend more time with Orwell and far less with the bromancer, but that's not the pond's mission ...

In the scene at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton hotel, when a gunman fired shots in the foyer on the floor above the event, one figure stuck out to me.
One Secret Service agent leapt to the front of the stage, directly in front of where Donald Trump was sitting. He was a big fellow and in those seconds he had just one job – to take a bullet fired at Trump. He had a protective vest. But his actions required incredible personal courage. Presidential bodyguards have been shot before, shielding presidents.
(I played an extremely unheroic version of this role myself once. In 1997 I spent a few days trailing Philippines president Fidel Ramos around his country. At a giant national day rally in a big stadium I was part of the president’s party but respectfully sat a metre or so away from him. Move up next to the president, his staff instructed. Later they explained this was so no gunman would be able to get a clear shot at the president. Yikes.)

Oh sheesh, TMI, as the reptiles celebrated with action men, Agents stand ready to fire at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as Donald Trump, along with other government officials, were evacuated from the Washington Hilton. Picture: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

It won't be too long before the bromancer will get tired of the valourising and then he'll turn to the philosophising, and at that point bromancer cultists will reap their rewards ...

The Secret Service agent’s action underscores a feature we seldom speak of, and that is the central role and necessity of physical courage in the face of violence for our society to function at all, and for peaceful citizens to continue to enjoy peace.
This Anzac Day, we remembered and celebrated that physical courage of tens of thousands of young Australians sent to war. I was surprised and delighted at my Catholic parish last Sunday that the Ode of Remembrance was recited, with its haunting tribute to young lives sacrificed: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.” The congregation sang the national anthem as pictures were projected of Diggers going over a ridge and of a navy warship. This occurred after mass so didn’t interfere with any liturgical rite. It was a marvellous recognition of the debt we owe to the courage of soldiers. Importantly, it signified, too, Christian acceptance of the moral virtue of the profession of arms, its necessity and its heroism.
Like the Americans, we exhibit confused paradox in our attitude to violence and courage. Some neighbourhoods are saturated in crime violence. There is something like an epidemic of domestic violence. We don’t have so many guns as the US, but there’s an undercurrent of political intolerance and borderline violence, especially directed by demonstrators against the police.

The pond has absolutely no idea why the bromancer should have been surprised by the recitation of that ode in a Catholic church. 

Back in the day, the pond recalls that galumphing marches up and down St. Nicholas's  church aisle by school cadets was standard routine for Anzac day, with sprigs of rosemary at the ready...and as for an "undercurrent of political intolerance", apparently the bromancer has yet to catch up with the seething hatred and fear and loathing emanating from News Corps 'assorted jihads, though the reptiles decided to run a few snaps to illustrate the point... Victorian police blasted the anti-war protesters in 2024 who rioted in ­Melbourne by hurling acid and horse man­ure at police; Pro-Palestinian and free speech protesters march in Brisbane this month. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

 

Back in the day, it used to be accepted that political protests were permissible and actually an expression of the democratic process, unless you happened to be taking a view of apartheid in Joh's streets ... or perhaps a view of US wars, when the police might be invited to run the b*st*rds over (*google bot safe).

Speaking of the undercurrent of intolerance, how long before the bromancer's own hoppy toads hop into view?

More so even than soldiers, our police are required every day to live out personal, physical courage. Every time a police officer visits a scene of domestic dispute, for example, they run the risk of confronting a violent person, high on ice or something else, armed with a gun or a knife. But if the police don’t go through the front door, the victim has no hope at all.
Courage is essential in many walks of life. Doctors and nurses display courage by exposing themselves to infectious diseases. Firefighters too. Sometimes society needs soldiers or police or even just good citizens in terrible circumstances to lawfully confront violence with violence.
The narcissism of contemporary politics is a social disorder, a mental affliction, which we suffer greatly just now.
It’s the absurd self-indulgence of any of us thinking our particular political views and causes are of such transcendent importance that they justify violence outside the law. This has for many decades been a conscious tactic of the left in Western societies.

And here you have it ...

Thus there are endless calls for “direct action” from campaigners allegedly trying to help the environment, particular racial groups, various gender and sexual preference identities and much else. 

You can almost smell the resolute denialism, mingled with a whiff of transphobia and black bashing saturating the air.

So making a political protest? Not in the bromancer's street ...

The direct action call is both corrupt and corrupting. 

What's corrupt and corrupting is the notion that ordinary people can't mount political campaigns to make their point known to the wider community.

Inevitably the bromancer went on to confuse such notions with wild-eyed anarchy and lawlessness...

It’s an assertion that I don’t need to abide by the rules that should bind other people. It’s most often directed at police. This has theoretical support among many elements even of mainstream left opinion.
A recent New York Times podcast was titled The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I? The podcast, obviously without justifying murder, accused assassinated healthcare fund chief executive Brian Thompson of practising murderous violence, structural violence as the left often call it, against those failed by the US health system.
The podcasters, though all affluent themselves, approved of theft from supermarkets and the like because the rich are too rich.

Oh dear, been there before, and with bonus Jewish stereotypes ...

At this point the reptiles flung in a snap of the suspect for the moment, a singularly inept and delusional wannabe assassin... Cole Allen, the suspected gunman at the WHCD dinner,

And then the bromancer revealed he really can't let King Donald go ...

For the use of force to be morally justified, the circumstances must be immediately causing great risk and the force must be authorised by law and morality. It’s the tremendous arrogance of individuals, or demonstrators demanding direct action, that believes they don’t have to abide by the rules because their cause is so transcendently important.
Thus the alleged shooter at the White House press corps dinner, Cole Allen, wrote in an almost sickly banal manifesto: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” This involves a wild mischaracterisation of alleged crimes by the Trump administration and a supreme arrogance in deciding an individual’s own political judgment is adequate to justify mass murder, as was apparently intended.

Um, actually on the balance of probabilities, a civil court decided that King Donald had committed a form of rape, and depending on your view of what hasn't been explored in the Epstein files, might have been found in an awkward - certainly uncomfortable - position with an underage girl, and could arguably - as an organiser of a coup designed to unseat the US government and ensure his continuing reign - be adjudged to have been a traitor, but the pond will leave others to argue the point.

Instead the pond will end with the bromancer deciding to be insufferably Xian ...

Trump’s exaggerated rhetoric, and the MAGA movement’s generally, creates the same exaggerated hostility and tendency to violence on the right. Right-wing violence is also growing. Both sides of politics are guilty. These trends culminate in suicide terrorists. Suicide is not the same as heroic indifference to danger. Intentional suicide for political ends (without judging those who tragically succumb to despair) comes from a hatred of life. Heroic actions indifferent to danger emerge from the deepest love of life.
Christianity is theologically unique in positing personal physical courage – Christ enduring crucifixion – as manifest in God himself. Anzac Day aside, we too often spurn traditional heroes and courageous warriors.
Yet, in our ignorance and confusion, we need them more than ever.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

About that crucifixion. 

How much courage is needed when you're actually supposed to be god, and so you're enduring a little short term pain before heading off to an eternity of godly bliss?

Never mind ...

And so to ancient Troy, providing a slightly different angle on King Donald's Amerika...

The header: America at 250 rewriting its own history in the age of Donald Trump; From renaming the Kennedy Center to removing slavery exhibits at George Washington’s house, Donald Trump has turned America’s birthday year into a presidential vanity project.

The caption for the orange clown: President Donald Trump gestures after speaking at a reception celebrating Women's History Month in the East Room of the White House. Picture: AP

Ancient Troy sounded decidedly gloomy ...

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, agreed by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in July 1776. The semiquincentennial, however, comes amid deep divisions in the US, its animating goals and ambitions being revisited and reconsidered, and its global leadership in retreat.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump underscores the polarisation. There is no justification for it; there is no place for violence in democracy. Sadly, though, America was born in violent struggle and its politics has always been marred by it. Four presidents have been assassinated and many more, in office or out, have survived attempts on their lives.
I recently returned from two weeks in the US, travelling through the original colonies that banded together to fight a bloody revolution for independence from Britain and rise to become a 20th-century giant with immense economic, military and cultural power, authority and influence.

In particular, he didn't seem to have much time for the king, currently consorting with another king ... ‘Character matters and Trump … is an embarrassment to most Americans.’ Picture: Getty

Fair dibs ...

Ancient Troy clearly spent too much time talking to punters in the field ...

It remains extraordinary that a small group of people such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel and John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison could emerge at such a time and place to inspire a people to rise up and win their freedom from a powerful empire.
How that remarkable story is remembered and retold is under challenge in the US, along with the ideals and aspirations of the founders and the revolutionary generation about how they should be governed and led, during the second Trump presidency.
Everywhere I went, from Boston to New York, Philadelphia to Richmond and Washington DC, Americans went out of their way to apologise for the divisions in their country and the actions of their President.
These comments came from people on subways or in bars, at museums and galleries, memorials and battlefields.
Character matters and Trump, though long a bully and braggart, repulsive and outrageous, is an embarrassment to most Americans. He is profoundly unpopular.

Profoundly unpopular? That's a rare acknowledgement from a reptile, though if the world continues in dire straits, it might get even more profound than profound ... Tankers and cargo ships anchored off the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas, which sits on the Strait of Hormuz. Picture: ISNA / AFP

Ancient Troy didn't hold back ...

The Iran war has been a disaster and could plunge the world into recession. Trump’s MAGA movement is splintering and one-time allies are openly criticising him and apologising for having supported him.
What struck me most was the visceral reaction of everyday Americans to Trump’s treatment of longstanding allies and friendly nations, namely Canada and Denmark’s Greenland, with threats of invasion, but also his treatment of Ukraine and NATO countries, and other nations that have endured punitive tariffs, nasty social media posts and Oval Office reprimands.
It is one thing for Trump to treat people with contempt in his own country, to corruptly enrich himself, shatter norms and conventions of presidential behaviour, flout laws and ignore congress and courts, pardon or commute sentences of Capitol riot­ers and those who assaulted police, and attempt to overturn an election.
It is another thing entirely to humiliate and intimidate nations that Americans like and respect.
Australia has been a steadfast friend and ally, alongside disastrous wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and hosts a growing US military presence. Why treat us so appallingly?
Trump’s self-aggrandise­­ment also troubles Americans. Presidential faces and names are carved in marble and stone mountains, appear on notes and coins, and designate roads, bridges and schools. These usually come long after a president has exited the White House. But Trump, with his unchecked ego and vanity, is seeking to remake the US in his image. This personal glorification of a president in office is without precedent. It is what you usually see in a dictatorship, authoritarian regime or military junta.

It's all too little and too late, and too irrelevant, what with the lizard Oz not a big mover and shaker in the United States, and Faux Noise still determined to note the slightest deviance from the MAGA bandwagon ...‘Ugh!’ Fox News Host Groans After Being Told Jimmy Kimmel’s Ratings Are Up Amidst Widow-Gate

Most concerning in this semiquincentennial year is Trump’s attempt to whitewash and rewrite history.

Ancient Troy kept brooding in a way that suggested he might want to join the Graudian ...

A huge banner of Trump’s face drapes over the departments of Justice, Agriculture and Labour. The US Institute of Peace was renamed for him. And he renamed the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts so his name prefaces the former president. His signature will appear on dollar bills and his face on new coins. His face also will be on tickets to national park sites.
There are plans for Trump-class battleships and several government programs already bear his name such as the $US5m ($6.98m) Trump Gold Card visa.
Trump tore up the White House rose garden, demolished the East Wing to build an oversized ballroom and decorated the walls with garish gold filigree as if it were Trump Tower. The adjacent 1888 Eisenhower Executive Office Building is to be painted white.
Most concerning in this semiquincentennial year is Trump’s attempt to whitewash and rewrite history. Philadelphia has become an early battleground for Trump’s MAGA-style assault on the past.
Near Independence Hall is the site of the President’s House. Washington lived at the site as president with his slaves (1790-97). Trump’s executive order Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History requires anything at a federal site that “inappropriately disparage(s) Americans past or living” to be removed. In January, the factual text-and-image boards that chronicled slavery at the President’s House were removed.

Next came a snap of a suffering victim... Kim Sajet, former director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, was fired by Donald Trump who claimed she was ‘highly partisan’. Picture: Getty

And that was about that ...

Dozens of monuments, parks and museums also have had content removed.
As a result, the President’s House site, next to the Liberty Bell, has been activated as a place of protest. Americans are turning up in their thousands to add their voice and words of dissent.

Steady on, the cluck-clucking and tut-tutting bromancer explained exactly what that sort of behaviour means. 

You can't just go adding voices and words of dissent willy-nilly in public. Please bromancer, remind ancient Troy ...

Thus there are endless calls for “direct action” from campaigners allegedly trying to help the environment, particular racial groups, various gender and sexual preference identities and much else. 

The direct action call is both corrupt and corrupting. 

QED. America is both corrupt and corrupting.

The pond simply had to put ancient Troy in his place as he wallowed in pity ...

The site remains largely stripped but a legal challenge by the City of Philadelphia has prevented Trump’s version of history adorning the walls.
Slavery is at the heart of the American story. It is the original sin. Many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners. Yet they adopted Jefferson’s wording that “all men are created equal”. It took a civil war to end slavery and another century before civil rights were enshrined in law.
Ahead of the 250th anniversary, it is a pity the US is so fractured and violence – shootings, terrorist attacks and attempted assassinations – is part of everyday life. At a bar in Philadelphia, a man sought to reassure me: “We are much better than our political leaders and we don’t all hate each other.”
That faith in America will be sorely tested this year.

They don't all hate each other? 

Can't say that for uncle Leon and scamming Sam ... (and that New Yorker profile mentioned by Wired can be found as ...

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?
New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI (*intermittent archive link)

The pond went there because John Oliver had another go at AI on the weekend, written up at the Graudian as 

John Oliver on AI chatbots: ‘Behind that machine is a corporation trying to extract a monthly fee from you’

The Last Week Tonight host dug into the many issues with AI chatbots released on the public without proper safety guardrails, from sycophancy to sexualizing children

And it provided a nice segue to a closing toon ... 

Tough times for King Chuck, Sir Keir, and Maggie Thatcher's legacy, but perhaps the bromancer will sort it out ...(please, no Falkland Island street protests) ...

Or perhaps this is more to Dame Groan's taste ...

In which Killer of the IPA and Major Mitchell get the holyday Monday nod, with commendations for some reptile triers (and they can be very trying)...

 

Knock the pond down again.

Just after John Birmingham had his EV rant and linked to The Drive, a certain Lisa Visentin did it again in the Nine rags with ‘Made in China’ EVs are taking over the streets, but just how safe is your data? (*intermittent archive link)

Lisa rabbited on endlessly about the dangers of the perfidious Chinese, but what of Uncle Leon getting all your data? How weird and deviant is that, but only deemed worthy of a sideways mention. 

And what of all the data collection by German and Indian and American manufacturers? What, if you own a reasonably modern gas guzzler, will happen to all the data stored in your OBD port? Like in your Merc?

Not to worry, it's just standard rant suffused with paranoid fear of the Chinese.

Well Chairman Xi is welcome to the pond's data, though the pond suspects that a weekly trip to do groceries might result in extreme ennui for him.

As for celebrities and "important people", take note of whatever your vehicle is doing, be it EV or gas guzzler, because all forms of modern cars collects data and your friendly local mechanic can download it and tip off your local Daily Terror reporter.

And so to the reptiles this holiday Monday (it's a holiday here and tough luck if you don't get seasonal benefits).

The Lynch mob was out and about scribbling ...

Latest assassination attempt reveals power of Trump’s luck
It turns out luck is an important ingredient of presidential success – the luck of staying alive perhaps chief among them.
By Timothy Lynch
Contributor

The pond supposes it should pay some attention to the latest attempt to whack the King, but "Luck" is a funny way to describe the singular incompetence of the wannabe assassin, matched only by the singular incompetence of the security team surrounding King Donald.

The pond doesn't want to spend a long time defaming the University of Melbourne, and so offers only this closing gobbet (spoiler alert) as part of the ongoing evidence...

...Having spent my career in the social sciences, I’m struck by how resistant the field has been to this insight. We tend to privilege grand, monocausal explanations. For much of the past century and a half, Marxian economic determinism cast a long shadow over the humanities.
More recently, class has given way to analytical frameworks that foreground race and gender as primary engines of historical change. What unites these approaches is a shared discomfort with chance: an impulse to impose coherence and necessity where accident and unpredictability so often rule.
An academic lifetime can pass in the patient work of making the evidence line up with one’s favoured structure. Trump’s failed assassins force us to appreciate the man’s sheer good fortune unrelated to any underlying structural factors. It turns out luck (what the great theorist of executive power, Niccolo Machiavelli, called “fortuna”) is an important ingredient of presidential success – the luck of staying alive perhaps chief among them.
The 46 men who have been president of the United States are among the most studied in history. And yet it is less what political scientists call structure and more fate that controls the destiny of this select group of men. It is often blind chance and good luck which explains why we have such contrasting presidencies to assess.
It is uncomfortable to admit that “crazy people” and “whack jobs” can change history. But Trump is living proof of this claim.

Talk about a whack job ...

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne

It's hard to know where to begin with that sort of mystical nonsense - the answer apparently lies in the soil - so the pond didn't bother...

Additionally the pond decided not to participate in the latest round of lizard Oz black bashing ...

If welcomes to country were used sparingly, they’d acquire broader support
Indigenous Australians have served with distinction, but on Anzac Day that service is part of the same story, not a separate one.
By Louise Clegg

Thank the long absent lord the intermittent archive is up and running this day, so the pond need only do a teaser trailer with the closer ...

...In Goulburn, where I live, our local RSL committee has always taken a wise approach, consistent with what occurs in many country towns. The Anzac Day service proceeds without a welcome to country or an Indigenous flag. No statement is made about it. No point is proved. No one from our Indigenous community has ever complained about its absence. It is simply understood that, on this day, many people come for a particular kind of remembrance, and that nothing should be introduced that risks unsettling that shared purpose.
Anzac Day does not require augmentation. It is not an occasion to layer on another strand of our national story.
Indigenous Australians have served this country with distinction, and their sacrifice forms part of the Anzac story. But on Anzac Day that service is part of the same story, not a separate one. The losses are equal. The grief is equal. The remembrance is shared.
It is a blessing that governments bear no responsibility for Anzac Day. But those in the RSL responsible for designing services in our major cities would be wise to follow the commonsense approach of their country counterparts.

Well played Louise. You didn't actually applaud the booers, the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists, but you provided fine arguments for them and incidentally, for some peculiar reason, bolstered the bigoted beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way in his bigotry ... as he heads down the road of becoming an extreme right warrior at one with Pauline ...

The pond also avoided the latest example of the latest reptile jihad ... an endless fascination with Lattouf ...

Lattouf’s latest career move appears to be no joke
Post ABC saga, Antoinette Lattouf’s career takes a funny direction
After attempting to reduce Ita Buttrose’s immense publishing legacy to an ABC saga, the controversial figure seems to be giving up journalism for another pursuit.
By Steve Jackson

There's something awesomely sick (and fully sickening) in the way the reptiles keep up their jihads long after everybody else has stopped caring, or tries to muster up the slightest interest.

The pond will note for the record the bog standard offering by simpleton Simon ...

Labor’s overall tax take is headed in one direction
Chalmers is promising tax reform, but all the so-called reforms floated appear to amount to the overall tax take going in one direction.
By Simon Benson

Contrary to the reptiles, the pond doesn't mind the rich being asked to shoulder a little of society's burdens, but does admire the way that the supine lickspittle reptiles of Oz serve their rich masters.

That noted, for bashing Jimbo or offering economic advice,the pond will rarely stray beyond Dame Groan or Killer of the IPA, and his Killernomics was on parade this day ...

The header: Move over, Gough. PM’s spending addiction won’t age well; After almost four years of the Albanese government, it’s time to declare it worse than Gough Whitlam’s.

The caption: Anthony Albanese leaves the Museum of Australian Democracy in Canberra after delivering his speech, 50 years since Gough Whitlam's shock dismissal. Picture: Martin Ollman

The pond has noted this tendency before - the way that the reptiles love to romp in ancient times, presumably because anyone under seventy doesn't qualify as part of the demographic.

The pond supposes that a 50 year anniversary should cut some sort of mustard, but the dismissal took place on the 11th November, which is a long way from the 27th April.

Couldn't have Killer saved his rant to then? 

Well no, Gough's not really the point. He's just a sock puppet from ancient times that Killer can use as a clumsy cudgel to give comrade Albo a pounding, though the pond has a few bob (verifiable shillings) on Kalshi betting that it has absolutely diddly squat meaning for vulgar youff ...

After almost four years of the Albanese government, it’s time to declare it worse than Gough Whitlam’s. The polarising former Labor leader led a chaotic, short-lived government in the early 1970s that ended spectacularly, but this government’s legacy will ultimately be worse, both culturally and economically.
Nations can deteriorate for reasons beyond their control; invading foreign armies or, less dramatically, a severe slump in demand for their exports. We’ve endured none of that yet living standards have been slipping by more than any other developed nation, largely through deliberate policy choices, including massive immigration levels and destruction of a once reliable cheap energy grid.
For all the talk of social cohesion, the national mood and sense of collective purpose is weaker than ever, amid extreme crackdowns on free speech that Whitlam would have thought unthinkable. GDP per capita, a common proxy for living standards, has steadily fallen in roughly two-thirds of the last 15 quarters – the longest sustained decline ever.
Even on the government’s own biased measures (which exclude the price of buying a home, interest rates and taxes), real wages (after inflation) are down more than 6 per cent since 2020.
At least Gough, who also had the redeeming quality of eloquence and erudition, occasionally displayed some economic sense. His government cut tariffs by 25 per cent across the board in 1973, helping open Australia up to the world.
The Albanese government’s contributions have been a roll call of recklessness, spending billions to buy university student votes, $300 electricity bill handouts, supercharging doctors’ incomes with $8.5bn of “incentives”, and bailing out steelworks and smelters its own emissions policies had made unviable. Meanwhile the NDIS, the centrepiece of the government’s so-called “care economy”, remains a policy disaster of epic proportions, and threatens to corrupt the entire nation.

For some reason the reptiles were determined to undermine Killer's work by reminding the geriatric demographic that he wasn't actually scribbling on the actual anniversary ...

Gough Whitlam addresses the crowds from the steps of Parliament House after his dismissal by Sir John Kerr, November 11, 1975. Picture: National Archives

And here we are on the 27th April, and the pond reckons this "we'll all be rooned" routine is up there with Dame Groan's always reliable output ...

Quite aside from a fiscal cost near the defence budget, the share of Australians who claim to be disabled has shot up from 17.7 per cent to 21.4 per cent in only a few years on ABS figures.
At the same time, Anthony Albanese is seeking to make childcare universal and publicly funded, adding a whole vast new layer of bureaucracy and cost at a time relentless bracket creep struggles to keep up with federal spending growth above 8 per cent a year.
Gough lifted federal spending from around 18 per cent to 24 per cent of GDP, where it roughly was when Labor won the 2022 election.
Canberra’s footprint will be almost 27 per cent by June, the biggest ever outside the Covid pandemic years, and only the naive would believe federal spending growth will collapse from 8.2 per cent this financial year to 3.1 per cent next, as the latest budget update predicts.
Whitlam famously expanded the commonwealth bureaucracy, lifting public service numbers by more than 20 per cent in just three years. Yet the Albanese government added roughly 40,000 federal public servants in his first few years, a larger increase in raw numbers, albeit from a far higher base. With a third term quite possible, Albanese could easily beat Whitlam on these measures too.

How weird does it get? Well to make sure that comrade Albo goes under the hammer, Killer of the IPA has to indulge in rampant reptile heresy ...

Gough ran a more fiscally honest administration, running budget surpluses every year of his administration. 

Is Killer suggesting the Dismissal was wrong?!

Stunning stuff ... and the pond almost thought of referring Killer to the reptile Inquisition for the misrepresentation of reptile history:

Federal public debt recently burst through $1 trillion, and Jim Chalmers has pencilled in $35bn federal deficits in each of the next four years as the soaring tax take fails to keep pace with spending.
Whitlam was honest about his intentions whereas Australia under Albanese is becoming a command economy by stealth.
Gough had the 1973 oil price shock to deal with too, in which oil prices almost quadrupled overnight, pushing up inflation in our then highly oil-dependent economy to almost 18 per cent.
Even before the latest Middle East war broke out, Australia’s inflation rate was almost 4 per cent, the highest in the OECD outside Turkey, and rising.

The pond supposes that these days it wouldn't be a proper reptile piece without the Bolter and the Canavan caravan joining in the parade ...

Nationals Senator Matt Canavan comments on Anthony Albanese’s reigniting the dismissal of Gough Whitlam 50 years later. “We’ve always known that the reason Anthony Albanese is in politics is to fight Tories,” Mr Canavan told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “Perhaps it would be better, though, if Anthony Albanese’s purpose was to lift the standards of all Australians.”

Killer followed up that visitation by a final gobbet of despair ...

Whitlam didn’t enjoy the extraordinary global demand for Australia’s resources Canberra still does, providing a deluge of company tax revenue that helps paper over the economy’s otherwise structural weakness.
No wonder the nation’s productivity growth over the past five years has averaged -0.4 per cent, the worst period on record, dragged down by an ever-larger non-market sector, according to the Productivity Commission. Around four-fifths of all new jobs are in the government or de facto government sector, something unthinkable in Gough’s day.
Whitlam made university education free when academic standards were still high and very few people attended. His government full dismantled the remnants of the White Australia policy but he didn’t seek to flood the nation with millions of workers from developing countries in a way that would obviously undermine native-born Australians’ quality of life and incomes.
Look no further than speculation leading up to the May budget for hard evidence of the weakness and cluelessness of the current government, despite having a huge parliamentary majority. Reducing spending growth of the NDIS from above 10 per cent to near 5 per cent sometime over the next few years is supposed to be a highlight.
Some minor changes to the capital gains tax regime are also planned – in the only budget far enough out from the next election where the government could actually make difficult decisions that would upset its voter base. Voters increasingly take the same dim view: Labor was thrashed at the 1975 election yet still managed to pull just over 40 per cent of the primary vote; 50 years later the party will be lucky to win 30 per cent at the next election.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Well played Killer, though the pond did wonder if the country, seemingly having survived Gough, might also survive time with comrade Albo. 

After all, we survived the onion muncher and Malware, so anything is possible ...

And after that burst of Killernomics and in the absence of the Caterist, the pond turned to the Major for a standard serve of Monday bigotry and bile.

Before beginning, the pond should note this delicious splash in Crikey (sorry, it's behind a paywall)

Just the header will do, and in a perverse way, it sets a tone for the Major's musings ...

The header: Let’s stop tiptoeing around Islamic intolerance and immigration; Australia needs to adopt a mature focus on the cultural integration of migrants, and the media must shed its naivety about multiculturalism.

The caption: Accused Bondi gunman Naveed Akram studied under ISIS-linked radical preacher Wissam Haddad in Sydney’s Bankstown Picture: Matrix News for the Daily Mail

The notion that the Major would ever tiptoe when he can perform like a bigoted bull in a China shop is a whimsical one.

The aim here is to bolster the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn's way in his attempt to start up a kind of war King Donald style down under.

It's part of an ongoing paranoid campaign, jihad if you will ...

Former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott was a speaker at the event. His speech had the title, "Mass migration across the Anglosphere must cease". (ABC here)

How naked can it get? Even more than that serve of white Xian nationalism?

As ugly as the way that King Donald has divided America and incidentally contributed to the ruination of many businesses that rely on migrant labour ...

Enough already with the introductions, time to get with the Major, chomping on his bigoted oats ...

Journalists are often quick to channel discussions about immigration into questions of political motivation.
ABC Insiders host David Speers was keen on April 19 to move the discussion on when both The Australian Financial Review’s Jennifer Hewett and news.com.au’s Samantha Maiden mentioned public concern about immigration.
Speers and his panel, which also included journalist Osman Faruqi, were discussing a speech by Opposition Leader Angus Taylor on April 14. Taylor flagged a new values test and other measures to vet potential immigrants.
Speers framed Taylor’s speech as a strategy for the May 9 Farrer by-election designed to boost the Coalition’s prospects against a surging One Nation.
Pakistan-born Faruqi, son of Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi and a one-time adviser to former Senator Lee Rhiannon, was sure the pivot would not work.
Hewett thought many Australians, including those not backing One Nation, were concerned immigration was too high. She said the Coalition was sending a coded message about values because it did not want to mention Muslim immigrants and thought Taylor was being careful not to offend Chinese and Indian migrants by not outlining specific cuts to the program.
Maiden said many social democrat governments were having similar discussions about migration, and referenced Denmark.
Hewett said more than 31 per cent of Australians today were born overseas, double the numbers in the UK and US.
Speers, Maiden and Faruqi seemed to agree Taylor’s approach “may not be racist enough” to appeal to One Nation voters but too racist for others.

Oh be fair, he's working hard to become a modern day Pauline, giving her preferences and doing all the things that racists do, and just to make sure we know this is a tribute to his ways, the reptiles slipped in a hagiographic snap of the bigot in chief, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has flagged a new values test. Picture: John Gass

Black people, brown people? He, and Louise and the Major have got it all covered ...

Taylor was motivated by One Nation’s poll surge. But Australia has been tiptoeing around the edges of wider issues about integration and multiculturalism since the September 2001 terror attacks in the US and the Bali bombings a year later.
This newspaper editorialised many times back then that democracies needed to be careful about allowing intolerant groups into nations built on the idea of tolerance: how much intolerance can a social democracy tolerate before its very nature is undermined?
That’s the question the Danes addressed in 2018 when they decided all Muslim immigrant children were to learn Danish, read Danish stories and taught the meaning of Christmas and Easter.
Denmark was rocked by Islamic intolerance in 2005 when a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoonists’ images of Mohammed. Nearly 200 people were killed in riots around the world and Danish embassies were targeted.
The English literary set got its Muslim tolerance wake-up much earlier, in 1989, when Iran’s first Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against writer Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses.
France in 2010 banned the wearing of Muslim full-face veils in public. The January 2015 Charlie Hebdo murders of 17 people, again over cartoons Muslims considered disrespectful to Islam, forced France tore-examine its attitude to one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations. France has seven million Muslim immigrants, about nine per cent of its population.
The controversial 2015 novel Submission, by French writer Michel Houellebecq, was a hit in France and Germany. It centres on the fictional 2022 election of a Muslim government in France and was branded “Islamophobic”.
The issue was turbocharged again by the 2017 publication of conservative UK journalist Douglas Murray’s examination of Islam’s expanding European footprint, The Strange Death of Europe.
In Australia it was crickets, for the most part.
But weekly demonstrations for more than two years supporting Palestine (in effect Hamas) and Iran, and the massacre of 15 people at Bondi on December 14, are changing that.
It was different after the Bali bombing and again in 2013-15 when some Muslim Australians went to Syria to fight for ISIS.
The ABC and left media between 2001 and 2015 largely ignored investigating domestic Muslim extremism, but it was covered extensively in The Australian by the likes of Cameron Stewart, Paul Maley, Martin Chulov and Sally Neighbour.
The ABC criticised The Australian in 2014 for publishing a page one photo of Sydney terrorist Khaled Sharrouf in Syria with his son carrying a severed head.

The pond wasn't surprised that the Major would revert to sensationalist glory days, so the least the pond could do was downsize the image ... The front page of The Australian on Monday, August 11, 2014

As tacky as it ever was ... but don't expect the Major or the reptiles to show a snap of some schoolgirl graveyards ...

There's no end to the atrocities to fuel the rage on both sides.

The Major carried on ...

Again, the newspaper was criticised when it hired an Arabic-speaking Druze journalist to attend mosques in Sydney and Melbourne.

At this point the pond must interrupt to note the way that logarithms can play funny tricks, in a way that makes you doubt your sanity.

For some reason an actual Tucker Carlson monologue turned up on the pond's feed. The pond only watched the monologue bit of Tucker responds to Israel's Attacks on Jesus Christ ...and only includes the link here because it's certain to offend the Major ...(strong warning, it's the first time the pond ever saw a Carlson monologue. Do you really need to soil yourself? Do you really need to encourage the criminal behaviour of the pond's logarithms?)

Now the Bondi massacre has forced the wider media to look at extremist hate preachers.
Journalists need to look at the role of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates that are taking a long view of the demographic challenges Islam presents the West.
The Jerusalem Post on December 18 published a piece under the headline ‘Europe is sleepwalking into the Muslim Brotherhood’s long game’ by veteran British diplomat Edmund Fitton-Brown and security and counter-terrorism expert Eran M. Teboul.
The article opens with a 2007 quote from the late Brotherhood intellectual Yusuf al-Qaradawi: “Islam will conquer Europe without resorting to the sword or fighting. It will do this through da’wah and ideology.”
Those, and a much higher birthrate than their host nations.
Da’wah is “education, charity and social aid, meant to bring others closer to Islam”.
In Australia, alleged Bondi shooter Naveed Akram studied under ISIS-linked radical preacher Wissam Haddad at the Al Madina Dawah Centre in Sydney’s Bankstown.

As expected, it didn't take long for the Major to drift off into Australian Daily Zionist News speak ...

Islamic preacher Wissam Haddad has faced court over alleged anti-Semitic speeches. Picture: Jane Dempster

The Jerusalem Post is a fine complement to the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The Jerusalem Post points out the Brotherhood has been banned in Egypt and most Gulf countries for 30 years, but is thriving in Europe.
“The basic freedoms and rights given by European democracies are an enabler. Freedom of speech enables endless … protests against Israel.
“Freedom of religion is exploited to allow hate preaching. Freedom of the press allows … ubiquitous penetration by Al Jazeera.
“Freedom of association is exploited by charities and political action groups, whilst the right to privacy offers a firewall for activities hostile to the host nation.”
It’s not just Europe.
Islamists are murdering Christians in Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan. Readers who follow MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute) will be aware of rising activism by Muslim hate preachers in the US.
Dearborn, Michigan, is 55 per cent Muslim.
Its Muslim mayor last September demanded a Christian minister on the city’s council leave Dearborn after criticising the renaming of an intersection after a prominent Hezbollah supporter.
Christianity was not long ago the dominant religion in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt (Coptic), Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya. Sudan and Somalia were Christian and animist.

At this point, having had his fun, the Major slipped in an obligatory billy goat butt, in the form of a "none":

None of this means most Muslims here are not good Australians. Nor at only three per cent of the population is Islam likely to become our dominant religion. 

But as soon as you get that sort of butt, as sure as hell you're going to get another butt ...

But we do need a mature focus on integration and less naivety about multiculturalism.

But that means diddly squat, a faux attempt at meaningless piety, with "mature" and "naivety" flung about as a way to soften the rampant bigotry.

Cue a final snap ...Dr Jamal Rifi has worked to stop young Sydney Muslims joining ISIS in Syria. Picture: John Feder

One thing's certain.

Each time the pond reads the lizards of Oz, it gets dangerously radicalised and this sort of closing puffery does nothing to help ...

This newspaper in 2015 made Lebanese-born doctor Jamal Rifi – a campaigner against the Muslim Votes Matter group at last year’s federal election – its Australian of the Year. Rifi had worked to stop young Sydney Muslims joining ISIS in Syria.
Sky News Australia chief executive Paul Whittaker, then editor of The Daily Telegraph, awarded Rifi the newspaper’s Pride of Australia Fair Go Medal the previous year.
It was a time when newspapers had the resources to cover the ethnic tribes of our biggest cities.

The pond has nothing against Jamal Rifi, except perhaps that he's sailed too close to the reptile sun.

But isn't he one of those pesky, difficult furriners the beefy boofhead and the lizards of Oz keep warning us about?

And speaking of privacy of data, as Lisa did at the start of the show, here's some juice for her next piece ...

And so to end with a little bit of light holyday fun ... (speaking of strange logarithms) ...

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

 

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

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

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

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

It's there in the intermittent archive.

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

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

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

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

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

Say what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pond was bemused. 

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

Does he have a team?

It seems so ...

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

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

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

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

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

Inter alia ...

The pond particularly likes that last one ...

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

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

But the pond digresses ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was the pitch for it ...

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

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

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

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

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

What was that, Angelic one?

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

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

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

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

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

And so to the search for a bonus ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can someone help the pond?

Yes, that's the word:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then it was on to the final gobbet ...

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

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

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

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

What say you, Angelic one?

Lest we forget?

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

Amen to that ...

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

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

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