Where's the bromancer when he's urgently needed?

 

The pond will repeat the question: where's the bromancer when he's needed?

Instead the reptiles decided in the current Venezuela fuss that they needed to back up the swishing Switzer by turning to the gun slinging, regime changing, war mongering Lynch mob ...ever keen to take down the reputation of the University of Melbourne.

As this is a late arvo post, a celebration of the pond's return to herpetology duties, best get stuck in straight away ...

The header: There’s no reason a powerful democracy should endure rogue neighbours, Why should a big, powerful democracy such as his US endure the misbehaviour of a failed state allied to his geostrategic opponents?

The caption for the war monger in chief (sssh, don't mention the Epstein files): US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Picture: AFP

The Lynch mob went at his MAGA devotions for a full five minutes, explaining at length that all that talk of isolationism and a retreat from the world to tend to American interests was so much idle blather. They've always been doing it, so why not do it again?:

Since the end of the Cold War, America has committed significant force abroad on at least 12 occasions. That is an invasion about every three years.
Donald Trump was twice elected to defy this pattern. Instead, he has reconfirmed it.
Last year, he attacked Iran – its young now in open revolt against the regime. This past weekend, he attacked Venezuela – its people now hope for something better than the impoverishing leftism of toppled Nicolas Maduro.
We might find Trump’s audacity remarkable, until we recall that he is doing what nearly all his post-1989 predecessors have done: use the most powerful military in world history to advance US interests. This has not always been the effect; it has consistently been the motive.
George HW Bush began the pattern by toppling Panama’s Manuel Noriega in 1989. Trump has continued it by foisting the same fate on the Venezuelan dictator. Experts are already warning us not to use the former as an analogue for the latter. I’m not so sure.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap of an aged warrior, Former US president George HW Bush. Picture: AFP

It's hardly news that the United States has been, is, and will attempt to be an imperial power, with a colonial interest in making sure it runs as much of the planet as it can.

More importantly, what does the Lynch mob think of this? Easy peasy, he doesn't mind ...

No analogy is perfect. I doubt the Trump team sat around reviewing Operation Just Cause, which removed Noriega. But Operation Absolute Resolve, which removed Maduro, mirrors it in ways that help us understand Trump’s decision-making.
At the micro level, we see the demonisation of a Latin American leader by the sitting US President. Bush Sr and Trump shared a remove-the-man-remove-the-problem approach. In 1989, there was a plan to install Guillermo Endara, the man whose election victory Noriega had annulled.
We will see if Trump is content to leave the apparatus of Maduro’s regime in place under another socialist or whether the woman who beat Trump to last year’s Nobel Peace prize, Maria Machado, gets his backing. Getting the bad guy has so far proved enough.
Among the narrow casus belli of both interventions was a declared US war on drugs. I’ll get to oil shortly – an important but not central motive. Both Noriega and Maduro used the narcotics trade to maintain cooperative relations with the drug cartels embedded within their respective polities.
Neither intervention was backed by a UN resolution. International law has a poor record of ending bad regimes; US power has proved much more effective. When Barack Obama joined a multinational attack on Libya in 2011, he had UN backing. The ensuing assassination of its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, did not.

This is standard form - drag in other presidents such as Obama to reassure the hive mind that everyone does it, so it must be good, as the latest in the queue featured in another snap, US President Donald Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Picture: AFP

At this point the Lynch mob threw in a reference ...

Conservative columnist George Will called Bush Sr’s Christmas incursion into Panama “an act of hemispheric hygiene”. There is a whiff of this in Trump’s decapitation of the Venezuelan regime. Personal antipathies shape much of Trump’s diplomacy.

Uh huh, so what does good old jeans-hating George think of this outing? 

Luckily he's already been out and about ...

Take it away George, the pond likes the idea of you serving as a side dish to the Lynch mob ...

The pond will pass over the quaint notion that the Monroe Doctrine has been revitalised as the Donroe Doctrine, while noting that good old jeans-hating George doesn't seem so enthralled by this latest round of regime change...

Luckily, there's no taint of legality in the Lynch mob's musings:

At the macro level, both actions look strikingly similar. For more than two centuries, the US has regarded South America as its backyard. It was far more interventionist there in the 19th and early 20th centuries than it has been since. But it has never stopped tinkering.
I was once stuck in a Dublin taxi with a driver who could recite every American crime in the western hemisphere from 1823 onward. He would surely be committing to memory Trump’s latest outrage. Very few Latin American states have escaped Washington’s attention. Before removing Maduro, Trump postured on reclaiming the Panama Canal. Who knows?
If Panama 1989 is important to remember, Cuba 1962 is unavoidable. This is the one nation the US was prepared to go to nuclear war over. It has not left the consciousness of its foreign policymakers, including a supposedly historically illiterate Trump. Nor has it lost resonance with Cuban Americans desperate for that tatty, neo-Castro autocracy to collapse. Bad blood with Cuba is now in its seventh decade. This tiny island should not matter. But, like democratic Taiwan to Communist China, it represents the inability of a superpower to assert its regional hegemony, an unsinkable aircraft carrier just off its coast.

Cuba 1962 is unavoidable? But what about Cuba 2026? 

Surely liddle Marco is just biding his time, as the reptiles decided to turn to fake news for a report, CNN Reporter Kevin Liptak says he expects the Venezuela strikes to send a “big message” to China and Russia. US Special Forces have captured Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife. They have both been removed from the country.

No thanks Kev for the interruption, it's back to the Lynch mob ...

Venezuela was helping keep Cuba afloat by selling it illicit oil. This socialist axis sat athwart Trump’s newly christened Gulf of America. Instead of crude oil helping to rejuvenate Latin America, the Maduro regime made it power socialist fantasies. Trump has surely ended them.
Also recall the deeper source of the bad blood: Russian support. Cuban communism has limped along for as long as it has because Moscow has wanted it to. Vladimir Putin, a student of the Cold War, knows he can counter Trump’s promises of Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine with Russia’s equivalent arming of Cuba.
If Trump can solve Venezuela, he can weaken Cuba and make it a more costly investment option for a stretched Russian treasury.
The macro level to appreciate is Trump’s attempt to reorientate US foreign policy away from Europe, from the eastern hemisphere, back to its own. If Europe is indeed dying, as several of Trump’s team routinely claim, America needs a new best friend and market. This means reawakening a centuries-old concern with US-friendly, stable governance in the western hemisphere.
As political scientist George Friedman has argued, there is “a geopolitical logic to Latin American intervention”, which is not unique to Trump but conforms with his America First agenda. Indeed, the President’s actions in Caracas suggest an emerging Americas First approach.
Strong, free-market economies, to America’s south, run by stable liberal democrats, are the best long-term guarantee that the flow of illegal immigrants and illegal drugs into the US will slow. Trump is not imagining a Marshall Plan for Latin America. He seems to have decided that where he can change the political direction of a neighbour by force, why not try?

Say what?

Strong, free-market economies, to America’s south, run by stable liberal democrats, are the best long-term guarantee...

Like this?

With friends like that, who needs authoritarians devoted to tariff abuse hanging around the gold gilt palace?

While the pond remembered the likes of the 1953 Iranian coup d'état - hasn't that been an ongoing treat for the world - and the butchery arising from the Chilean coup - good old tricky Dick in top form - the reptiles were all in on celebrations ...Thousands of Venezuelans living in Madrid gather at Puerta del Sol to celebrate the arrest of Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro. Picture: LightRocket via Getty Images

Good luck with all that follows from this administration.

And so to the final justification, and the ongoing defamation of the University of Melbourne's ever fading reputation ...

Why, Trump has asked, should a big, powerful democracy such as his US endure the misbehaviour of a failed state allied to his geostrategic opponents? Why must he stop at dealing with the consequences of illegal immigration from Venezuela when he can stop it at source, by changing the regime causing it? Vice-president Kamala Harris was charged with solving this problem and failed. Trump has shown much more resolve.
Under the rule of Venezuela’s United Socialist Party, a quarter of the nation’s population has fled abroad – proof that the best antidote to socialism is the experience of living under it.
There are about the same number of Venezuelans as there are Australians. Imagine the population of Victoria going into voluntary exile to escape the government in Canberra. That is the scale of Maduro’s failure. Trump has called it to a halt.
These features of a remarkable weekend in Venezuela are present across the last several decades of US statecraft. The need for stable neighbours. The necessity of balancing Russian power. The demands of regional security. The balancing of global dependencies. Donald Trump has inherited them more than he has created them.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne. He is author of In the Shadow of the Cold War: American foreign policy from George Bush Sr to Donald Trump.

What planet is this prof on? E.g.:

The need for stable neighbours. The necessity of balancing Russian power. 

It turns out that grifters, con artists and snake oil salesmen are suckers for those with greater con artist skills (warning, Murdoch link):

US President Donald Trump’s reaction was immediate.

He insisted he was “very angry”.

He’d just got off a two-hour-long phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin tyrant had complained that Ukraine had just tried to kill him.

The 47th President of the United States then walked into face-to-face peace talks at his Mar-a-Lago mansion with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.

When they emerged, both leaders had little to say.

Trump told reporters he was “very angry” about the alleged attack on Putin. He insisted it was one thing to “be offensive”, but another matter entirely “to attack his house.”

Zelensky, who has himself survived more than a dozen Russian attempts on his life, denied Ukraine had launched any such strike.

Later, President Trump, 79, reacted with confusion to questions about the alleged attack on Putin’s lakeside Dolgiye Borody estate near Valdai, Novgorod.

“No, I don’t know about it actually,” Trump said, shaking his head. “I just heard about it, actually, but I don’t know about it …. That would not be good.

It took Moscow three more days to present what it claimed to be evidence.

A photo of a single drone downed in the snow. Footage of distant flashes. A map showing the alleged route flown by 91 drones. And a couple of “eyewitness” testimonies.

International analysts found this to be somewhat less than conclusive.

But Putin’s objectives may have already been met.

Trump’s talks with Zelensky had been less than warm.

And Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had already proclaimed the Kremlin would “revise its negotiating position”.

The gilt gold clad warrior has always been a fawning, devoted believer in Vlad the Sociopath. 

The necessity of balancing Russian power? 

Pull the other one, sycophantic blathering University of Melbourne prof.

Enough already, the pond is back, but already is wishing it was back on the road again ... oh Corryong, Corryong, will the pond ever see your hills again? Or is the future a redacted hellscape?

Greetings from Camperdown (not that one, the cockroach one) ...

 

Rellie duties and backblocks sightseeing done, the pond is back at base, exhausted and in urgent need of some R and R.

But what did you do during those interminable moments in the car, wandering around the bleak and flat Victorian countryside?

The pond is glad you asked.

Much of the time was spent with podcasts, in particular a five parter (a sixth episode is due as a live event later in January), an LRB podcast, Aftershock: The War on Terror ...

Daniel Soar looked at the way that the United States responded to 9/11, and one strand given extended treatment was the continuity in presidential behaviour from that year to the present incumbent, from George W. Bush's adventurous imperial wars to King Donald's walking the same turf (the current Venezuela folly happened too late for the show, but it fits the thesis, and no doubt will be picked up in the January episode).

Soar isn't the greatest presenter, and the use of music is generally crass in the ominous school of cheap vibes, but he brought the receipts for an unremitting era of American imperialism.

Viewed this way, King Donald isn't an exception, but rather a natural progression, a development of all the strands that came before him - including but not limited to the creation of a surveillance state and the use of the global economic system to punish American enemies (and Obama and Biden walked the same path - see the podcast).

The show didn't go into all the various commentators who facilitated or enabled or otherwise stayed true to the assorted colonialist, imperialist missions, but the pond immediately felt the need to turn to the archives.

Take David Frum, for example, currently burbling away in The Atlantic in a non-Trumpist way. 

He was a speechwriter for the GWB administration, and in The Right Man he offered a glowing insider account of the Iraq war.

Frum took the credit for the creating the term "the axis of evil" (now celebrated as the axis of weevils), a line in the hall of shame that sits up there with the sexing up of a UK intelligence report which apparently had no authors (Alistair Campbell refuses to take the credit for the lies that prompted Tony Bleagh's shameless reversion to British empire days).

Bush lacked the vulgarity, the narcissism, the snake-oil selling effrontery of King Donald, the sheer gilt-gold gaudiness, but how on earth could Frum have a go at the new emperor, for just doing what Bush had done?

He tried ...

Trump’s Critics Are Falling Into an Obvious Trap
The capture of Nicolás Maduro is a show of ambition that calls for an effective response. (*archive link) (titled in the archive version Trump’s Critics Should Not Go Wobbly Over Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro’s capture is setting off a predictable reaction).

Did you see that line?

 The progressive impulse to blame Trump for doing too much in Venezuela can obscure the reality that—for all the noise—Trump may not have done enough.

They can't help themselves. 

The main problem with King Donald, it seems, is that he might not be an effective maintainer of the empire...

And never forget the likes of David Brooks and Bill Kristol.

The pond chanced upon a memory of those two rogues in a Mother Jones' newsletter by David Corn back in March 2023... The Iraq War: A Personal Remembrance of Dissent

Corn allows himself a pat on the back at the end, but fair enough, he didn't join the rat pack enthusiastic mongers for war ...and that allows him a chance to dish on others ...

...A few weeks before the invasion, I was doing a radio appearance with another friend who was working for an important newspaper. (He’s now a prominent media figure who has been a passionate foe of Trumpism.) He confided that he was uncertain how to assess the Bush administration’s argument for war. But, he said, since New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was for it, he, too, supported the attack. At the time, Friedman had an odd stance. He believed a war would ignite progressive change throughout the Arab world, though he noted he was “troubled” that Bush was justifying the war by falsely alleging Saddam was allied with al Qaeda. “You don’t take the country to war on the wings of a lie,” Friedman insisted. Nonetheless, this important influencer backed the invasion. I was disheartened to see my friend, a smart fellow and usually an independent thinker, cede his opinion to Friedman. But like many in Washington, he decided that sticking with the herd provided adequate cover.
An aside: Two months into the war, Friedman asserted in an interview with Charlie Rose that the invasion was a necessary response to 9/11, despite the fact that Saddam had nothing to do with that attack: “We needed to go over there basically and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that [terrorism] bubble. And there was only one way to do it…What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?…Well, suck on this.’”
Suck on this? That was the level of thought that fueled backing for the war.

Friedman's always been something of a loon, but there was also Bill ...

...in the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003, it was tough to counter the fearmongering, magical thinking, and unsophisticated analysis that drove the cheerleading for war. During the run-up to the invasion, I appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show with Bill Kristol, the godfather of the neoconservative movement and a leading advocate for clobbering Iraq. I pointed out that the WMD inspections in Iraq could be useful in preventing Saddam from reaching the “finish line” in developing nuclear weapons. Kristol responded by exclaiming, “He’s past that finish line! He’s past the finish line!” He was saying that Saddam already had his mitts on a nuclear weapon, bolstering the White House’s assertion that Saddam presented a nuclear threat to the United States.
But Saddam wasn’t past any “finish line.” There was no evidence he possessed nuclear weapons. The UN inspectors had so far found no sign of an Iraqi program to develop them. (Post-invasion reviews confirmed Saddam had not been running a nuclear weapons project.) But in those dreadful months before the invasion of Iraq, the proponents of for war could say anything—and get away with it. The day before we jousted on O’Reilly’s show, Kristol declared that a war in Iraq “could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.” The pro-war propaganda received precious little scrutiny. Most of the media had abandoned one of the most crucial tools of our profession: skepticism.  (See the infamous case of New York Times reporter Judith Miller.)
There was also David Brooks, another fellow traveller who thinks a smarmy smile and a cheesy grin are enough to get him out of trouble, and allow for the forgiveness of past sins ...
At one point, I debated David Brooks, then of the Weekly Standard, over the necessity of launching a war against Iraq. He summed up his support for the endeavor by asking: Don’t you believe the people of Iraq desire democracy just as much as we do?
I was surprised by his naiveté. I was no expert on Iraq, but it was obvious to me that invading and possibly occupying a nation half a globe away could end up rather messy, and that a universal craving for democracy might not trump all else. It seemed to me that Brooks was relying on fairy tale analysis, projecting simplistic assumptions onto an extremely complicated situation. (Sunni, Shiite—how many advocates for war knew the difference?) Yet this was all Brooks needed to champion a war that would cost the lives of nearly 4,500 US troops, injure 32,000 service members, and add $3 trillion to the national credit card—and leave millions of Iraqi civilians displaced and more than 100,000 dead.

And don't get the pond, or Corn for that matter, started on Dick Cheney, who turned anti-Trump in his old age, as if he couldn't recognise a soul mate, a spiritual comrade in arms, a man who would do to Venezuela what Cheney did for Iraq.

Corn took a final swipe at the fellow travellers ...

...Back to my main point: One did not need to know more about Iraq than the war champions to be skeptical and question the crusade for war. The key reasons for the invasion were dubious, and the post-invasion plan seemed non-existent. Yet dissent was dismissed.
And many, many people died. Chaos and violence wracked the region for years, with effects that continue to this day. But did anyone pay a price for causing this catastrophe? Suffer a consequence? Bush and Cheney—after their allies swift-boated Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign—were reelected. These days, Bush paints pictures of American veterans, nice dogs, and world leaders. He is paid between $100,000 and $175,000 a speech. Rumsfeld and Powell are dead. Rice is a prestigious professor at Stanford University. Ari Fleischer, Bush’s White House press secretary who helped propagate the false case for war, became a (well-paid, I assume) consultant for professional football teams, golfer Tiger Woods, and others. He recently was working for the Saudi-backed LIV Golf Tour. Kristol remains a highly regarded pundit and a leading figure in Never-Trumpland. Brooks is…well, you know.

Yes, yes, we know, oh we know ...

And the pond reads Kristol in The Bulwark and quite enjoys his Never-Trumpism, and yet can never quite forget that his career has had all the elasticity of a lump of Jello.

Rachel Maddow shared a memory, archived here ...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WILLIAM KRISTOL, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Whatever else you can say
about this war, let me just make my point, George Bush is not fighting this
like Vietnam. Whatever, we don't need to be fighting the whole history of
Vietnam.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Saddam, maybe, that's the danger.
KRISTOL: It`s not going to happen.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let me take a call.
KRISTOL: It's not going to happen. This is going to be a two-month
war, not an eight-year war.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: This is going to be a two-month war, not an eight-year war.
He was talking about the war that did turn out to be an eight and a half
yearlong war in Iraq.
Now, Bill Kristol, the living, breathing symbol of wrong about
national security, Mr. Kristol has a fresh deal going. Now, his new
project is that he wants to stop the nomination of former Senator Chuck
Hagel as secretary of defense. President Obama today chose the Republican
from Nebraska for that job.
And despite having been fine with Mr. Hagel even as a possible vice
president for George W. Bush in 2000, Bill Kristol is now leading the
opposition to Chuck Hagel at defense. Bill Kristol, the same guy who said
Iraq would take two months, who said the only consequences of us bombing
Iran already would be good consequences, the man who thought up the Sarah
Palin vice presidency, the one man in America who can least be the arbiter
of what is reasonable in national security. That same one guy, Bill
Kristol, now bought ChuckHagel.com where you can go to learn that Bill
Kristol believes that Chuck Hagel is not a responsible option.
Oh, Senator Hagel, may you always be blessed with comically non-self-
aware enemies. It is not every nominee for secretary of defense whose foes
are their own punch lines.

And now he's in his anti-Trump phase, what could he possibly say that wouldn't sound comically non-self-aware?

Did any of them suffer any punishment? Corn again:

Am I bitter? Not at all… Okay, that’s a lie. Many of the Iraq war enthusiasts went on to have wonderful careers. Few publicly expressed any signs of remorse or being burdened by their colossal mistake. (Powell was an exception. For years, he appeared to be haunted by his role in the war.) Those who cautioned prudence and warned a war might not be such a swell idea were hardly hailed for getting it right. But history has rendered its verdict. Being correct—especially on a matter of war—can be its own reward. Journalists are supposed to serve the truth, not spread the spin. Too many did not heed this calling in that terrible time.

And now here we are with the Venezuela adventure.

It will take some extraordinary contortions for isolationists to suddenly turn gung ho, and enjoy the colonialism, celebrate the intervention.

And what will those interventionists do, the ones who cheered on the Iraq war and yearned for regime change?

Will they end up sounding like Brooks April 2004, pretending to be A More Humble Hawk? ( that's an archive link)

Brooks couldn't let go of the dream ...

Did you see that line? 

"...I still believe that in 20 years, no one will doubt that Bush did the right thing."

What could Brooks possibly scribble about Venezuela that wouldn't sound comically non-self-aware?

The pond isn't going to shed any tears for Maduro, an authoritarian of the first water, though possibly a runt up against a genuine authoritarian of real clout, such as Vlad the Sociopath or King Donald himself.

But acts of piracy and murder on the high seas, and regime change based on false premises haven't worked well in the past, and likely won't work well again.

There are some obvious motivations - when in trouble, imperialists like to bung on a war, and King Donald sticks to that rule ... (what were those pesky Epstein files again?) 

The ability to loot a country rich in oil must also count for something.

Meanwhile the swishing Switzer was first out of the gate yesterday in the lizard Oz, and being lazy, the pond decided to make him the entry point for a return to duty ... (the Lynch mob also responded to the call to arms, but lack of room means he'll be a celebratory late arvo posting, as the pond gets serious about its herpetology):

Of course the pond won't be really satisfied until the bromancer has a go, especially as the swishing Switzer introduced all kinds of caveats and uncertainties, to give himself an escape hatch further down the track ...

Already chomping at the bit to do over Cuba?

Perhaps Brazil as well?

Here we go, here we go ...

In the end, the swishing Switzer comes good with the dreaming:

There it is in the last gobbet, the dream of the impossible dream ...

...One of the enduring lessons of the Iraq war and other “forever wars” that Trump rightly criticised is that democracy is not an export commodity: it is a do-it-yourself enterprise that requires the right conditions and circumstances. That remains the case. But it is now fair to ask whether Venezuela might yet show that standing up to tyranny can succeed – and that democracy, once lost, can be reclaimed.

The disunited states, currently run by an emperor (with actual triumphal arch pending) is a democracy worth exporting?

The swishing Switzer could have shown some imagination ...

...it is now fair to ask whether the United States might yet show that standing up to tyranny and gold-gilt obsessed kings can succeed – and that democracy, once lost, can be reclaimed.

Fat chance. Now he's turned up on YouTube, which has displaced patriotism as the first refuge for the disreputable scoundrel ...

Onwards and upwards, and the pond hopes that this year, reptile studies can offer what was on view in the village of Tilba ... clairvoyance (seeing), clairsentience (feeling), clairaudience (hearing) and claircognizance (knowing)...

Readings will be available ...for clairherpetology ...

High on the curriculum ... stopped clock syndrome ...

Greetings from Nimmitabel…

 

The pond was delighted to see correspondents greet the new year with verve, vivacity and verse.

Meanwhile, the pond continues its peregrinations, this time taking in the origin story for the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way.

You see, before going on his valiant mission to help destroy the planet, the humble lad first attended the Nimmitabel Public School (still perched on a hillock in the hamlet).

The village has fallen on hard times since that golden age, but the pond was pleased to see the old Sundowners movie pub had been given a refuge for coffee swillers, and that the abandoned railway station had been turned into a men’s shed. (The hamlet’s never been the same since the night they drove the old line down and the bells were ringing).

Sad to say, some have forgotten the beefy boofhead’s noble battle against satanic windmills in his early days, putting him on a similar career path to that of King Donald.

Angus did his best, but the pond was startled and appalled to see a wind farm lurking not far from the village which had groomed the child.

Once again the WCRS (whale corpse removal squad) had done a tremendous job cleansing all traces of the carcasses of the creatures daily killed by those infernal machines (handily, they’d also removed the corpses of all the Oz critters routinely mashed to a pulp), but it was mortifying to see some farm animals loitering nearby, apparently unaware of the dire peril surrounding them. As for the landscape, how they ruined the vision of bleached, parched tundra:

In related news, the pond was shocked to see Wired recently recycling ancient warming myths:

How long before this fear mongering ends?

How long before Nimmitabel’s shame vanishes in the wind?

How long must the pond wait until returning to the sweet, climate-science denying bosom of the lizard Oz, the IPA, and the likes of the Riddster?

The link?

https://archive.md/sf3hL

Handy further reading:

The link, with apologies for holydays formatting:

https://archive.md/d4gEC

Greetings from Corryong …

 

A wag at Salon dubbed 2025 the year of the hive mind, mainly on the basis of shows such as Pluribus and Sinners (those with a taste for bad 2024 action flicks might want to throw in the profoundly inert Jason Statham blathering about the bad queen bee’s spawn and the need to protect the hive in The Beekeeper).

Of course none of these match the hive mind at the lizard Oz, which launched a truly despicable jihad to round out the year.

Now a new year looms like a pox and soon it’s back to herpetology studies - in due course after the pond has finished its high country tour.

Meanwhile, may the happy holydays continue for correspondents trying to crank up the energy for the exhausting, debilitating business of yet more reptile wrangling …

Oh, and enjoy the view…

Buckle up. If anyone thought 2025 was a bummer, 2026 is shaping up to be a doozy, with a high quota of cockies at large, and reptiles determined to act as galahs …

A screen cap of a survey recently featured in a David Pakman YouTube video …

Buckle up!

And here’s that Salon link …

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/29/from-sinners-to-pluribus-2025-was-the-year-of-the-hive-mind/

Mmmmph …hive mind …

Greetings from the Hume highway ...

 

Devastated ...

That's the only word for it.

The pond was hoping to provide incontrovertible proof that the whale-killing machines located near the Hume highway had done bumper seasonal business killing stray whales and assorted wildlife ... while grazing creatures fled in stark, abject terror from the hideous death machines, more threatening than a bunch of Martians in a bad Spielberg re-make.

The pond produced nil visual results.

Rumour has it that a team based in Goulburn is sent down each day early in the morning to clean away the blood and guts of hundreds of dead whales...so that clueless city dwellers passing by have no idea of the carnage that's been committed.

The pond is offering a reward for a Hume highway dead whale sighting ... some visual alternative to this dreadful banality ...

And now just because the logarithms wanted to remind the pond of the lettuce's travails ...

Hit the Road, Dot, and don't you come back to dem reptiles no more, no more ....

The pond was grateful that Apple dropped the last episode of the first season of Pluribus before Xmas ... it had a zinger of a hook for the next season, and there's something in the constant talk of the hive mind which echoes the pond's voyages through the collectivist, jihadist lizard Oz mind - though frankly it's not so much a blissful group who've achieved a group think nirvana, as a bunch of hysterical, screeching Carols lacking the charms of Rhear Seehorn (talk of Pluribus is not a pond endorsement for dropping bucketloads of cash on assorted US streaming services).

Speaking of the latest jihad, the reptiles were still boxing away this day, though there were a few chinks in the armour ...

The Lynch mob was to hand to maintain the rage ...

Bad luck or systemic failure? How the left flipped the script on Bondi
Bondi Beach has produced much more evasive indictments of anti-Semitism. For too many on the left, Islamophobia is the thing and anti-Semitism just a natural consequence of whatever the Israeli government does.

... so it was off to the intermittent archive with him.

The pond has done all the work it intends to do on that matter. 

You want to suffer? Follow the link and hope the intermittent archive is working.

There were pearls of wisdom too, (*archive link), for those yearning for a serve of Dame Groan lite ...

All the pond could think was how typical was the Groaning, and the illustrations, featuring the usual downcast look, or a surly aggressiveness ...

Thank the long absent lord that this groaning dispenser of pearls of wisdom is now a former Treasury assistant secretary.

Curiously the craven Craven broke ranks, with a piece which was as ancient in tone as the aged prof is absent of wisdom ...

The pond decided that all that was needed was a reminder that the reptiles don't do humour ... 

Perhaps reading the craven Craven was even more dysfunctional than enduring a family Xmas dinner, even worse than hunkering down with rellies ...

Reading him trying to be funny about rellies induced a profound sympathy in the pond for anyone who had him for a relative and had to endure his company at Xmas... and as for those illustrations, the long absent lord have mercy on the ghost of long departed lizard Oz graphics department.

Off to the intermittent archive with him ...

The lizard Oz editorialist also tried a walk on the wild side, with one of three featured editorials stepping outside the current jihad to contemplate Vlad the sociopath ...

Strange how the reptiles always fail to mention that it's King Donald and his minions that have enabled Vlad the sociopath ... and that it's the likes of Faux Noise that helped give King Donald and his minions to the world.

And speaking of the King, strangely the reptiles overlooked the stunning Xmas spirit emanating from the disunited states, far more noble than that other King's Xmas message ...

That's more than enough of that, before the pond hits the rellie-laden road, and the reptiles disappear over the horizon ...

Before hitting the road, the pond would like to end on an up note ... words, and more specifically, dictionaries containing words ...

This strand was triggered by Louis Menand, scribbling a few days ago in The New Yorker ...

Is the Dictionary Done For?
The print edition of Merriam-Webster was once a touchstone of authority and stability. Then the internet brought about a revolution. (*archive link).

A teaser trailer:

Apart from being reminded that the pond - once a dictionary fanatic - now never opens a dictionary, amongst the things the pond enjoyed?

Learning new words and concepts ...

...He also introduces us to terms likely to be new to many readers: “sportocrat,” “on fleek,” “vajazzle,” and the German word Backpfeifengesicht, which is defined as “a face that deserves to be slapped or punched.” Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro, was his illustration, until he came across a tweet from Ted Cruz’s college roommate. “When I met Ted in 1988,” it said, “I had no word describe him, but only because I didn’t speak German.”

Only Ted Cruz? 

Carol would have a lot more Backpfeifengesichts in her sights ...why, the pond can think of a parade of reptiles who show their Backpfeifengesichts to the world.

The pond was dragged back to the days when a bloody good time was had by all ...

....Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961, flipped the script. Fatsis says that it “changed lexicography.” Web. III had an open-door policy. It was descriptivist. The editors did not abandon the concept of Standard English, which they defined as English “well established by usage in the formal and informal speech and writing of the educated,” and they indicated when a word was considered nonstandard. But they eliminated the label “colloquial” and reduced the number of words labelled as slang. The spirit was nonjudgmental.
This seems unexceptionable today, when even popular language columnists, such as the Times’ John McWhorter, are manifest descriptivists. Language is what people say, not what they ought to say. But Web. III was brutally attacked. This was not too surprising. The people who attacked it were professional writers, and their attacks appeared in leading publications. No groups could have had a greater proprietary interest in Standard English. Verbal punctilio was the very basis of their livelihood. If anything goes in the realm of usage, they go, too.
So the Times attacked Web. III for “permissiveness” and “informality.” “Intentionally or unintentionally,” the paper said, “it serves to reinforce the notion that good English is whatever is popular.” Let the Times decide what’s fit to print, please. The Atlantic called Web. III “a scandal and a disaster.” It was ridiculed at entertaining length by Dwight Macdonald in these pages and, some forty years later, at equally entertaining and longer length, by David Foster Wallace, in Harper’s. (The proximate target of Wallace’s article was A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, but he devoted a lot of his piece to attacking Web. III. Some of his claims about it were erroneous.) In 1964, the Times saw fit to run a story with the headline “Outdated Webster II Still Sells; Educators Like Old Dictionary Better Than New One.”
The flash point was the inclusion in Web. III of “ain’t.” (The president of Merriam-Webster had ruled out “f*ck,”(*amazingly this has to be google bot approved) over the objections of the dictionary’s editor-in-chief, Philip B. Gove.) The “ain’t” taboo is a little odd; the word is just a contraction of “is not,” “are not,” or “am not.” But, in 1961, the use of “ain’t” in the United States was a very clear marker of social class, like saying “I seen him at the mall.” The “ain’t” controversy laid bare the stakes in lexicography: language use as an indicator of status.
This was, after all, the era of “My Fair Lady,” which is entirely about language and class. The setting of the musical is British, but that may be why it was so popular in America. Americans didn’t see themselves being lampooned. The 1956 Broadway production won six Tonys, including Best Musical, and had the longest run of any musical at the time. The cast album reached No. 1 on Billboard and remained in the Top Two Hundred for four hundred and eighty weeks—nine years. “My Fair Lady” touched a cultural nerve, and it prepared the way for the hostile reception of Web. III. The New Yorker, itself a cynosure of proper usage in those days, ran a cartoon showing a receptionist at Merriam-Webster telling a visitor, “Sorry. Dr. Gove ain’t in.” That was no doubt enjoyed by the magazine’s “My Fair Lady” fans.
The war over Web. III was, in short, a culture war, and culture wars are really class wars. Which group is up or down, top or bottom, in or out? Who is calling the shots for whom? In a review for The American Scholar, Jacques Barzun, the Columbia historian, called Web. III “the longest political pamphlet ever put together.” According to the editors of the new edition, Barzun complained, “whatever ‘the people’ utter is a ‘linguistic fact’ to be recorded, cherished, preferred to any reason or tradition.” He made it clear that this was not a cultural dispensation of which he could approve. Is the latitudinarian, post-humanist, post-standard world that Barzun dreaded the world we are living in today?

Remember that Dwight Macdonald reference - what a right royal dweeb he was, the pond will dare to go there - but not before before being startled ...

....Looking at online dictionaries, you can see plenty of selection going on, but it’s hard to grasp the principles that are guiding it. Take “groyper,” a name for followers of Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist Svengali. (“Svengali” is in the O.E.D. and Merriam-Webster, but not in Cambridge.) “Groyper” has popped up a lot recently, because Fuentes was in the news. But the word is reportedly eight years old—and it has still not made it into the online O.E.D., Merriam-Webster, or Cambridge dictionaries.
It does have an entry in Wikipedia, whose policy of giving entries to everything helps it keep ahead of the dictionaries. It can also operate quickly because it’s crowdsourced. It does not employ experts. Having found the definition for “groyper” somewhere, you might care to know how to spell it. In Wikipedia, the word is capped as a proper noun, but the Washington Post lowercases it in most uses. Normally, you’d look to a dictionary to tell you which is correct, but, since most popular online dictionaries do not recognize “groyper” as a word, this can’t be done. Welcome to the desert of the virtual.
On the other hand, the free Merriam-Webster online does list “cheugy,” a word meaning uncool, used especially as a put-down of trends associated with millennials. It is possibly related to the excellent Australian word “daggy,” but the coinage is credited to one Gaby Rasson, who is supposed to have used it with her friends at Beverly Hills High School in 2013. Not exactly Dr. Johnson territory. “Cheugy” has no etymology. It’s a nonsense word. Rasson said it just sounded right. “Cheugy” is pretty niche. It’s missing from Cambridge, the O.E.D., and even the American Heritage Dictionary, and it seems to have lapsed into disuse. It is also missing from the latest print edition of Merriam-Webster—the twelfth, which was released in November—and will presumably proceed to disappear down a lexical memory hole.
Scientific and medical terms are a problem, partly because there are so many but mainly because nonspecialists almost never use them. The standard edition of Merriam-Webster does not give us a lot of help with even the brand-name versions of these terms. It defines “Prozac” as “a preparation of fluoxetine”—technically correct, but not what people are thinking when they use the word. Merriam-Webster admits “Lipitor” as a word online; the O.E.D. does not.
Product names generally are an area of oversupply. Merriam-Webster has “Kleenex,” but not “Triscuit,” even though Triscuits have been around longer. American Heritage does not have “Triscuit,” though it does have “Kleenex” and “Coke.” The O.E.D. has all three brand names, plus “Guinness.” Speaking of brands, “OED” is a word in the O.E.D.

Daggy.

So it's not just the pond that appreciates Tamworth...though really Barners had grown out of "daggy" into disreputable clown.

And then there was this ...

...If you’re too old or too young (and you always are), generational slang is impossible to stay current with—and what’s the point, anyway? Any Gen Z-er can tell you what “gooning” means, but it’s not in most dictionaries; nor is its near-synonym “edging.” For such words, on the borderline of respectability, the fallback resource is the online Urban Dictionary (which has “fleece quarter zip” without a hyphen). But it, too, is crowdsourced, and you will often get random irreconcilable meanings, along with an alarming amount of contributor trash talk. Is “Skibidi” a word? Is “six seven”? How do you define them? They have no content. What about “bigly”? A lot of what comes out of our mouths is word salad.

The pond has been startled to note of late that the Daily Beast has taken to referring to King Donald's minions as "goons" and as members of assorted "goon squads", a sad traducing of a noble BBC comedy show which introduced the notion of excellent bacon that could only be had before the war ...

It got darker, because bringing up the goons reminded the pond of an outing by Daniel Kolitz in Harpers:

The Goon Squad
Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation

Endless masturbation? That reminded the pond of the lonely business of looking at the reptiles, hunched over and going hard at it ... 

This past January, a few dozen young men in hoodies and baggy jeans congregated outside a coffee shop in Tempe, Arizona, to mourn the death of a twenty-seven-year-old man named Nautica Malone. They arrived on foot and riding shotgun in parents’ cars; they carried flowers and votive candles, homemade placards and shirts printed with Malone’s smiling face. The café where they were gathered, Bikini Beans, was part of a chain whose baristas wear bikinis. Days earlier, Malone had pulled up to the drive-through window, nude from the waist down, a hand on his penis. The barista was already filming by the time the car reached her window. It’s hard to say why this particular sex crime went viral. Maybe it was something about Malone’s expression: he looked confident, even sultry, like he was hoping somehow to seduce the barista. Whatever the reason, the video was soon inescapable online. The view count was still climbing when Malone drove a few towns over and shot himself in the head in the front seat of his Dodge Challenger, leaving a note to his wife and young children asking for their forgiveness.
Malone’s death was covered widely in the tabloids and trended on social media, where it was described as the “Goonicide.” His vigil, meanwhile, was an ironic, livestreamed stunt that came to be known as the “Gooneral.” Remarkably, this language—Goonicide, Gooneral—was broadly legible to hundreds of thousands of people who engaged with it online. The implication, unmistakable, was that the verb “to goon,” the root of these terms, had broken containment. By the time you read this article, a full definition might be needless, but in the sincere hope that that day has yet to—will never—arrive, I will provide one.

Sorry, Mr Kolitz, TMFI, and you can call that a word ...

Back to Dwight, and one of the joys of the intertubes is that you can visit long lost times ...

The String Untuned
A review of Webster’s “New International Dictionary, Third Edition, Unabridged,” edited by Philip Gove, in comparison with Webster’s Second and the Oxford English Dictionary. (*archive link)

If you happen to subscribe to The New Yorker, you can read the text in situ, and at that point the advertisements offer a real distraction.

You learn a lot about the magazine and the demographic that Macdonald was writing for ...

Discerning females...

Mobile men ...

 

A lust for air travel... including good old Qantas ...

And above all, a seemingly unquenchable thirst for grog ...

 

And throughout all the advertising, a deep desire to be in Europe, or be European, or at least drive British cars, or swallow imported expensive grog while dressed in fashions that emulated a sense of European style.

There was more, a lot more. There were ads for the Saturday Evening Post, for the TV Guide, for clothing, for hotels, for diamonds as big as the Ritz, for Sony, an advanced technology marvel ...

How different it now is, while in between the ads, Macdonald burbled on, outraged by any hint of dictionary modernism ...

Enough already.

It's all there in the intermittent archive for those who want more ...

All gone now ... the past is a different country...but speaking of the breezy air of the present, the pond was exceptionally disappointed that Menand didn't mention the real word of the year ....

...Texting has produced a substantial vocabulary of acronyms and shorthand expressions, many of which date to when cellphones had numeric keypads, or at least to when messages were restricted to a hundred and sixty characters. (How did we ever live like that?) Many of those terms have migrated into e-mail and even into print. Merriam-Webster acknowledges the text-speak invasion by including LOL, TMI, IRL, and IMHO. But it does not recognize SMH, LMK, or JK—or “u” for “you” or “r” for “are.” “JK” can be important to know. The practice of acronyming and nicknaming is now widespread, part of a general speeding up of speech: “def,” “rando,” “preggers,” “fomo,” “homes,” “GOAT.” Are these words? They function as words.

Once a word is in print, is it permanently in the lexicon? Or do words have a sell-by date? If you search the O.E.D. for words used in print for the first time in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” you will get, amazingly, a hundred and seven results. Many of those words became part of the language, but many others (“fardel,” “bisson,” “drossy”) were nonce words that are now considered obsolete. Should they be included in a dictionary, since Shakespeare is Shakespeare and people still read “Hamlet”?

Then, there is linguistic play with parts of speech—nouns recently converted to verbs, verbs used as adjectives. I suspect that blogging and online writing in general have increased this kind of stylistic freebooting (one of the best things to happen to American prose, IMO). But the question of when a grammatically trans term deserves a dictionary entry remains unsettled. Merriam-Webster has the verb form of “nail,” for instance, as used in the sentence “She nailed the test,” but not the adjectival form, as in “Tom Brady was nails in the fourth quarter.” None of the online dictionaries carries “awkward” as a noun, as in “Being seated next to his ex at the company dinner served up a big bowl of awkward.”

There are also what could be called pop-up words, labels that attach to a certain social or cultural phenomenon as it flashes across the sky. Some of these are minted for the occasion, like “TACO,” for Donald Trump’s tariff waffling, and others are older words given new prominence, like “quarter zip.” But is “quarter zip” spelled with a hyphen? Don’t ask Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, or the O.E.D. None of them has it. By the time they do, quarter zips may already be too cheugy for school.

What, no mention of FAFO?

The pond can't think of a more relentless activity this past year, and there's going to be a heck of a lot of FAFO'ing done in the new year ...

But that's for later ...sharpies ready at the noggin, with the lizard Oz reptiles sublimely unaware of what their US kissing cousins helped unleash on the world ...

Cue a final bit of trolling ... just to keep that US-UK flavour rolling …