In which the bromancer offers blessedly rational insights, Lloydie of the Amazon is resurrected in a gushing Easter miracle, and Our Henry goes full theologian ...

 

Some days the pond has to give up a lot to follow the reptiles at the lizard Oz.

Look elsewhere, and you might find news of King Donald giving Pam Bondi the boot.

Or news of him mocking the Macrons' marriage, producing the mild retort that the thuggish one was "neither elegant nor up to standard" in his verbiage.

Or more fun with the ongoing bimbofication sessions saga. (caution, intermittent archive link)

Or the King's retreat from SCOTUS.

And other stories, such as White House Scrambles to Wipe Trump Meltdown Footage never had the ghost of a chance

The White House posted and then rushed to delete an hour-long recording of an event with President Donald Trump that captured him lashing out at the Supreme Court after justices signaled expressed skepticism about his birthright citizenship case.
The president privately hosted a group of MAGA pastors and religious allies Wednesday for an Easter luncheon at the White House. Trump made several bonkers remarks during the event, which was never meant to be seen by the public, as the White House quickly deleted the footage from its official pages.

Instead the pond has to cope with the bromancer trying to decipher the real meaning of the low energy word salad that King Donald fed his base ...

The header: Donald Trump’s clearest Iran pitch was still full of contradictions; The US President’s address contained myriad inconsistencies, and leaves the world not much better informed about his plans for the Middle East.

The caption for the snap of the King: President Donald Trump arrives from the Blue Room to speak about the Iran war. Picture: AP

Usually the sight of the King would immediately inspire a matching cartoon, but the pond didn't have the time or the space.

Worse, the bromancer could only manage a paltry three minutes as he tried to shape something coherent out of a completely incoherent speech.

The pond supposes that it's like that old joke complaining about the lack of quality in the food, and the small portions in the serves:

Donald Trump’s address to America was his most coherent statement of purpose in Iran for many weeks. He offered, at the start of the speech, a good rationale for why action against Iran was justified.
Yet, while Trump is always better when he sticks closer to the teleprompter, the speech still contained myriad contradictions, and leaves the world not much better informed about what he plans to do, or what might happen, in Iran.
One explanation for what Trump has been saying for weeks is a continuing attempt by him to jawbone the markets. Every time Trump says “the war’s nearly finished, I’m going to bring the troops home soon”, the markets respond favourably, the price of oil drops, the prices of stocks rise.
Except that didn’t happen this time. That’s because of the law of diminishing returns, and because whenever Trump says something cheerful and hopeful, he contradicts it a minute later with prophecies of Armageddon.
This speech was no exception. The war’s going great. We’ve nearly achieved all our objectives, nearly finished, it’ll be over soon.
Phew!
But then, actually we’re going to keep bombing for another two or three weeks and we’re going to hit harder than ever.
And, we the US don’t need any access to the Strait of Hormuz. We don’t need any deal from Iran. We don’t get our oil from the Strait of Hormuz. So after we’ve gone that will be someone else’s problem.

It was a feeble effort, already running out of steam.

Even the bromancer, a devotee of nonsensical war mongering, couldn't make sense of it all.

By the time the reptiles offered an AV distraction, the bromancer was getting ready to fall down the rabbit hole, if not with Alice, then certainly with the King ... Donald Trump says ‘never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks’.

After that point, the bromancer's thinking dissolved into a puddle, like Frosty the snowman caught in a climate science denialist's heatwave...

But, if we don’t get a deal from Iran, then we will bomb it back to the Stone Age. We’ll destroy every single one of their electricity-generating plans. We may well destroy all its oil industry facilities.
So is a deal completely unnecessary to Trump and the US? Or is it so important that Trump will bomb Iran back to the Stone Age and destroy its oil industry if he doesn’t get one? Your guess is as good as mine.
At least this time he didn’t threaten to bomb Iran’s desalination plants. Did someone take it out of the speech? Does even Trump realise there must be some limits to what he threatens?
On regime change, Trump claims, fantastically, that regime change has already happened in Iran. This is preposterous. Trump has long held the view that he has a special power to create reality by just saying something.
It’s astonishing how often that actually works for him. But if Trump truly believes there has been regime change in Iran because the US has killed dozens of its leaders, he’s hallucinating. Of course, he doesn’t really believe that. This is the power of his brazenness, which sometimes serves him well but which, increasingly, people can see simply denies reality.
On the matter of Iran’s 400kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent, which is near weapons grade, Trump no longer believes it’s necessary for the US to get hold of this, either through Iran surrendering it or US forces taking it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier said it would be necessary for US forces to take this material. Trump’s special negotiator, Steve Witkoff, said the existence of this stockpile was why the US went to war.
Trump now says US bombing has made a big, dusty mess of the sites where the uranium is believed to be stored and America can simply watch these sites from the air – from satellites, presumably – and if Iranian personnel make any attempt to retrieve the material, the US can hit them again.
But all that could have been achieved with a military operation of a few days.
And, of course, Trump might very well be trying to mislead, while US special forces prepare what would have to be the most daring raid in history.
The tone from Trump this time was blessedly rational. But we still have almost no idea what he plans to do, or what he might do.
That’s our world.

That's what's passes as "blessedly rational" in the bromancer's world?

Roll it around on the tongue, savour the taste of blessedly rational as an Easter treat ...

...we still have almost no idea what he plans to do, or what he might do.
That’s our world.

Put it another way.

Now there's a blessedly rational car wreck for you ...

And now to the reason the pond felt constipated, jammed up, overloaded this Friday.

You see at the top of the page there came the return of Lloydie of the Amazon, a gushing Easter miracle, and the reptiles were all in ...

Lloydie of the Amazon was equally into it, with a bigly eight minutes opus on offer ...

The header: Does Australia - and our PM - have what it takes to drill baby drill?; In just two decades, Australia has gone from energy self-sufficiency to dangerous dependence. Like the US, we can turn it around. The question is, will we?

The caption: What, say what, no caption for that splendid piece of lizard Oz graphic art? 'Tis sad, but true, the way that creative genius goes unrecognised this day...

The pond had almost forgotten that Lloydie of the Amazon existed - thought he might have got lost in the Amazon again as he tried to save the world via tourist resorts - but instead he's back and worse than ever.

All the pond could do was stand back and let him gush his devotion to fossil fuels ...

Like the explosive power of fossil fuels, the global story of energy is shaped by crisis. Australia is no exception. The war in Iran is forcing government to confront our import dependence. Since 2000 Australia’s liquid fuel equation has flipped. We have gone from being self-sufficient in oil and petrol, with eight refineries supplying 98 per cent of consumption, to having two refineries and a reliance on imports for roughly 90 per cent of our fuel needs.
Across the same two-decade period, the US has achieved the reverse and both Japan and Germany have absorbed a bitter lesson in energy vulnerability.
Lessons from the US, Europe and Japan
Two Gulf wars and the ingenuity of a wildcat driller, George Mitchell, transformed the US from being dependent on the Middle East for crude oil to being the world’s biggest producer and an energy export superpower. The transformation is due to Mitchell’s discovery in 1997 of how to drill wells horizontally and liberate oil and gas held deep underground in rock formations.
The energy crisis theory also works in reverse. During the same period, the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and associated Fukushima nuclear disaster up-ended the power equation and energy security of industrial powerhouses Japan and Germany. Both countries swore off nuclear energy as a result of the Fukushima nuclear accident – despite the fact it did not cause any deaths – but both have now changed their minds.

It was nuke the country to save the planet time ... The No. 3 reactor building at Tokyo Electric Power Co's tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2010.

When Lloydie gets gushing and nuking like this, there's nothing to do but stand back, or get caught in the geyser ...

Japan has restarted 15 nuclear reactors and another 10 are in the process of restart approval. Energy market disruption caused by the war in Ukraine spurred Japan to further reconsider nuclear because without it Japan must import about 90 per cent of its energy requirements. This is why debate in Australia about changes to gas production, exports and the prospect of super profit taxation is watched closely and of great concern in Tokyo.
The loss of Russian gas because of the invasion of Ukraine also left Europe badly exposed.
Germany had turned to Russia for gas as it shut its last three nuclear power plants in 2023, but German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told business leaders this year it had been a “serious strategic mistake” and the country would rebuild nuclear production.
In 2025, nearly 70 per cent of Germany’s energy needs were met through international imports despite the many billions of dollars that have been spent on a world-leading renewable energy transition. “I want us to eventually have acceptable market prices for energy production again and not have to permanently subsidise energy prices from the federal budget,” Merz said. His answer is nuclear.
Australia’s feat of energy self-harm
It can be argued that, like Germany and Japan, Australia has performed its own feat of energy self-harm. Exploration for oil has been allowed to falter and production of liquid fuels has been sent offshore by a combination of economies of scale, lack of investment and strict environmental mandates from government.
In Australia, climate change has become the crisis that drives energy policy. But, as the war in Iran has shown, energy security is about a lot more than phasing out coal-fired power stations to make electricity. Australia runs on diesel fuel. Fossil fuels produce the fertilisers we need to grow our food and export crops. Fossil fuels make plastics that are ubiquitous to construction and modern life. Diesel-powered cranes unload containers at the wharves and diesel-powered machinery mines the coal and iron ore we export and fuels the trucks that keep our supermarket shelves stocked.
Work is being done on electric-powered trucks but they have their limits. They are more expensive to buy and their small range is not suited to Australia’s long-haul routes. Heavy batteries lessen the payload that can be carried and presumably further increase the cost of freight.
Big miners are exploring ways to shift production to electric diggers and dump trucks, but while Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue is talking a big game about what the future holds, BHP and Rio have slashed spending on green initiatives. This mirrors a global trend to get back to basics.
The evidence is that Australia must work to encourage future investment in the energy and resource projects that pay the bills against strong competition from Canada, the US, South America, Africa and elsewhere. And we must decide if we want to re-establish domestic energy security or remain dependent on extended import supply lines at a time of global upheaval and potential conflict.
There have been plenty of opportunities lost. The failure of the much-hyped hydrogen revolution to work at cost and scale has left us without a clear pathway to replace liquid fuels.

In cases like this, the pond can merely observe and offer for the pleasure of its correspondents, with illustrations... Oil from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The BP-leased oil platform exploded and sank in 2010, leaking an estimated 200,000 gallons of crude oil per day from the broken pipeline.

How Lloydie relished the disaster:

Deepwater Horizon and our last best chance
The failure of the last best chance to replace the dwindling oil reserves from Bass Strait can be traced to another crisis: BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater crisis gave environment groups the leverage they needed to campaign against BP’s ambitions to drill for oil in the deep waters off the Great Australian Bight.
Deepwater Horizon in 2010 was the world’s biggest oil spill in which 800 million litres of oil was spewed into the Gulf of Mexico across 87 days. Only about 25 per cent of the oil was recovered, leaving half a billion litres of oil in the Gulf. BP said economics, not environmental politics, caused it to pull out of the bight project but its own oil spill modelling showed a Deepwater Horizon-style spill in the bight could take more than six months to control, would be certain to hit land and would spread oil for thousands of kilometres. If a spill happened there was a “high probability” it would affect important marine species, including sperm whales and pygmy blue whales.

Yet more disaster footage... The US Coast Guard battles blazing remnants of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

Lloydie gushed on ...

After BP pulled out, Norwegian energy giant Equinor was given permission to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight but it also pulled out in February 2020, citing poor project economics. Equinor said the project did not stack up financially with other global energy projects. This is despite estimates that more than nine billion barrels of oil could be extracted from several fields, making it – despite the much deeper waters – the logical replacement for dwindling reserves in Bass Strait.
The discovery of oil in Bass Strait in the Gippsland Basin off Victoria in 1965 by Esso and BHP fundamentally changed the nation by delivering energy self-sufficiency. More than five billion barrels of oil have been produced from Bass Strait across five decades but production has been in steady decline since peaking in the 1980s.
Export exposure
Rather than being self-sufficient, Australia today is a major exporter of energy, principally coal and gas, but a net importer of liquid fuels. According to the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, in 2022-23 Australia produced 771 petajoules (equivalent of 131 million barrels) of crude oil, condensate and LPG, of which more than 94 per cent was sent offshore.
In return about 90 per cent of refined products including petrol and diesel were imported, mostly from refineries in South Korea and Singapore. Australia now has only two operating oil refineries – the Lytton Refinery in Brisbane and the Geelong Refinery in Victoria – which provide only about 17 per cent of domestic demand. Australia consistently falls short of the International Energy Agency requirement to hold 90 days of net oil imports, typically maintaining roughly half that amount.
Opting to import our liquid fuel requirements was a conscious decision. The Australian Institute of Petroleum, an industry lobby group set up to promote self-regulation, argued in 2017: “Australia’s transport fuel security depends on flexible supply chains and diversity of product supply, not domestic refining of domestic crude oil.”

Lloydie was wild-eyed with local excitements... Offshore oil and gas production on the North West Shelf off WA.

There's nothing like living the climate science denying, renewables fearing, fossil fuels loving dream ...

Its members were Ampol Limited, BP Australia, Mobil Oil and Viva Energy Australia.
The AIP argument was that Australia did not need to subsidise local refineries or a new nationally owned refinery.
It said if Australia had more refineries to meet domestic fuel demand, this would simply result in more crude imports as domestic crude production was insufficient and unsuitable by itself to achieve “self-sufficiency” in transport fuels.
The AIP said substituting crude oil imports for petroleum product imports would not increase transport fuel security.
It said no new refinery had been constructed in an industrialised/Western nation for more than 20 years. And Australia offered none of the capital or operating cost benefits available in many developing countries.
“Compared to refineries across Asia, Australian refineries suffer from substantial disadvantages in operating and capital costs that preclude Australia from consideration for major new refinery projects,” the AIP said.
“In the context of Australia’s demonstrated efficient and reliable access to large-scale refineries in Asia (and excess Asian supply currently and forecast), it is difficult to see any case for the very significant cost of a taxpayer-funded refinery (for example, at least $US5bn for a minimum efficient scale refinery).
“High coastal shipping costs would make domestic distribution from a ‘central’ refinery uncompetitive against imported cargoes of fuel.”
Many of these things still may be true. But the Iran war crisis has exposed our vulnerability. We are dependent on much more than fuel and if the war continues the economic costs will continue to escalate.
How we can turn this dependency around
Like the US, Australia is well placed to turn around our import dependency.
At present, Australia’s oil production is heavily concentrated in a few offshore regions, with most of the remaining crude resources located in the continent’s northwest and southeast.
According to Geoscience Australia, the Northern Carnarvon Basin in Western Australia is Australia’s most prolific oil-producing region, accounting for nearly 70 per cent of the country’s remaining identified crude oil resources.
The Gippsland Basin, which includes Bass Strait, is in a significant state of decline and transitioning towards decommissioning.
The Cooper-Eromanga Basin in South Australia and Queensland is the largest onshore oil and gas province in Australia.
The Bonaparte and Browse Basins in Western Australia and the Northern Territory are massive gas hubs but produce large quantities of condensate, which is used as a refinery feedstock.
There is renewed interest in Queensland’s Surat and Bowen basins, where the Taroom Trough has been identified as a “new oil frontier”, with major exploration and appraisal drilling under way.
This week Queensland Premier David Crisafulli said the field had the potential to produce “hundreds of millions of barrels” of oil.

What set Lloydie off? What brought him back? 

Could this be another terrifying thing to pin on King Donald's Iranian excursion folly? 

It's perhaps not down there with murdering 150+ schoolgirls, but it's a goodly firestorm, An oil tanker burns after being hit by an Iranian strike in the ship-to-ship transfer zone at Khor al-Zubair port near Basra, Iraq, on March 11.

Lloydie stayed all in, until the final frenzied gush of oil-fuelled madness ...

“There’s potential for a veritable sea of domestic oil right here in Queensland,” he told the Liberal National Party’s annual State Council. “We must promise ourselves, as a nation, never again will we be vulnerable entirely to foreign conflicts injuring our energy security. For too long, the national conversation about mining has treated the industry as something we should be embarrassed about.”
The Iran war is a wake-up call and a chance to rethink national priorities.
To succeed, however, it would be necessary to match crude oil production with refining capacity, create large stockpile reserves and to develop an efficient way to distribute product around the country. And, as in the US, this might involve leaning into unconventional technologies such as fracking that have proved highly controversial.
There is still work to do to prove up reserves in the Taroom Trough in Queensland. And there are bitter fights to be had about the environmental risks of deep-sea drilling in the Great Australian Bight.
But, as in the US, shale oil could be our big untapped potential. The Beetaloo Basin is a massive, highly prospective shale gas field in the Northern Territory that is transitioning from exploration to commercial production, with first gas sales to the NT domestic market targeted for mid to late 2026. Several key wells in the Beetaloo Basin have confirmed the presence of liquid hydrocarbons with estimates of hundreds of millions of barrels.
The same is true for the Canning Basin in Western Australia.
The question is whether Australia still has the institutional and political wherewithal to drill baby drill.

Phew, please allow the pond to pause to celebrate what war can produce ...

At this point, the pond had no alternative but to do a hard cut on Killer of the IPA, a scandalous sacrilege for a Good Friday...

At best, the pond could offer a teaser trailer ...

And the pond could offer a fragile link to Killer in the intermittent archive, working early this day ...

PM’s fuel excise cut just ignores our real energy problems
For weeks people have put up with being accused of irrationality for ‘hoarding’ petrol when such behaviour is a perfectly rational response.
By Adam Creighton
Adam Creighton
Contributor

But the pond had to rule against full coverage, on the grounds of space and redundancy.

What could Killer add to what Lloydie of the Amazon had already gushed about? 

Not much ...

...The sad transition from having among the cheapest energy in the world to the most expensive rests mainly on the government’s obsession with replacing cheap fossil fuel with unreliable wind and solar energy. Barely 6 per cent of the workforce was employed in manufacturing last year, around half the level it was two decades ago.
Albanese also extolled the wonders of removing the lower minimum pay rates for 18, 19 and 20 year olds. After returning from the US last year, where there are no such concessional pay rates, I was struck by how many young people worked in retail. These changes won’t be great news for many young Australians who will simply be passed over for a more experienced, older worker.
What new limitations on gambling advertisements, also part of the PM’s speech, has to do with how the government would handle the emerging fuel crisis is anyone’s guess.
Unfortunately, there’s little governments can do to alleviate panic buying once it’s begun. Unless they can convince people their facts were mistaken – very difficult in a crisis when governments are known to lie – formal rationing can only exacerbate the panic. Next week could be interesting.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

So Killer had to be sacrificed, but it was for a good cause - in the spirit of the season.

With Killer of the IPA truncated, neigh crucified, that left room for a full outing with Our Henry, proudly on hand for the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The header: How the ancient story of the Exodus forged the foundations of Western freedom; What happened at Sinai was not merely a religious revelation. It was the founding moment of a new kind of political order.

The caption for the painting that helps date Our Henry's thinking: ‘The miracle of the Exodus’. Moses and the Children of Israel Crossing the Red Sea, c.1855, by Henri Frédéric Schopin.

The 1850s? Possibly a tad too modern, muh lud.

The hole in bucket man offered a bigly seven minutes of Easter piety, skating around the awkward way that Jews and Jesus lovers and trinitarians have their issues.

The pond was reminded of this recently when it took another look at the Coen brothers' bit of fluff Hail Caesar, about Hollywood making a bible epic ...

Narrator: Ancient Rome. Twelve years into the rule of Tiberius, ruler maximus. Rome's legions are masters of the world, the stomp of its sandals heard from the Iberian peninsula in the west through the halls of the great library of Alexandria in the east. As oppressed people everywhere writhe under the Roman lash, freeman and vassal are united in one compulsory worship. The emperor, Caesar, is Godhead, lord of every man's body and spirit. For those who will not submit, the galleys, the arenas, even crucifixion await. But there is a new wind, blowing from the east, from the dusty streets of Bethlehem, that will soon challenge the vast house of Caesar, that edifice wrought of brick and blood which now seems so secure!

Why, it's almost as good as a Thucydides reference.

Curiously only the week before that the pond had dipped into a really terrible Bible flick from the 1950s and the Coen brothers were true to brand ...

Protestant Clergyman: Who plays Christ?
Eddie Mannix (the studio head trying to get the assembled clergy to give the script a tick of approval): A kid we're all very excited about, Todd Hocheiser, a wonderful young actor we found in Akron, Ohio, after a nationwide talent hunt. But Hocheiser is seen only fleetingly and with extreme taste. Our story is told through the eyes of a Roman tribune, Autochlus Antonius, an ordinary man, skeptical at first, but who comes to a grudging respect for this swell figure from the East.

The film was full of great theology:

Catholic Clergyman: God has children.
Rabbi: What? And a dog? A collie, maybe? God doesn't have children. He's a bachelor. And very angry.
Catholic Clergyman: No! No! He used to be angry!
Rabbi: What? He got over it?
Protestant Clergyman: You worship the god of another age!
Catholic Clergyman: Who has no love!
Rabbi: Not true! He likes Jews.

Our Henry's playing the role of the rabbi ...

At last, the time had come: as they prepared to flee Egypt, the children of Israel stood on the threshold of deliverance. But even before they were freed, they received a commandment that would echo through the ages.
“This day shall be unto you for a memorial,” said the Lord, “and throughout your generations you shall keep it a feast forever.”
That command, given thousands of years ago, was once again observed this week as Jewish families across Australia celebrated Passover. In many homes, the mood will have been sombre – darkened by the hostility that erupted with the massacres of October 7, 2023, and then metastasised into murderous antisemitic violence.
Yet the Passover Seder – the ritual meal in which the Exodus story is recited and retold – is above all a time to remember, to celebrate and to pass on from one generation to the next the miracle of the Exodus.
It would be a mistake to see the narrative of the flight of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt as simply a gift to the Jewish people. Its themes have shaped the Western tradition itself and, through it, the democratic inheritance Australia received with British settlement.
That inheritance is now increasingly fragile. Understanding the ideas that underpin our liberty is therefore more crucial than ever. The Exodus narrative is, at its core, the story of how they entered our world.
Not conquest, consent
What happened at Sinai was not merely a religious revelation. It was the founding moment of a new kind of political order. When the children of Israel stood at the foot of the mountain, they did not receive a code imposed by a conqueror or a law decreed by a king. They entered into a covenant.
The Hebrew word – berit – describes a binding, bilateral, conditional commitment between God and the people, in which obligations run in both directions. God committed himself to Israel; Israel committed itself to God’s law. The community the covenant created rested not on conquest but consent.
Nothing like this existed in the ancient world. The great empires – Egypt, Assyria, Babylon – understood power as flowing downward from a god-king whose authority was absolute. The Exodus inverted this logic entirely. The God of Israel had heard the cry of slaves and taken their side against the greatest empire on Earth.
Power was no longer self-justifying. Those who wielded it were answerable for its use.
The covenant at Sinai added something more far-reaching still: that even the highest authority was bound by commitments it had made. A ruler who broke the covenant – who governed in his own interest rather than his subjects’ – forfeited the claim to their obedience.

Don't expect the pond to make any sense of this. The pond is a hard core atheist, not of the angry king, but rather the sort that's bemused at the notion of putting the cutlery out in the garden ... Orthodox Jews in New York observe ‘biur chametz,’ a Jewish ritual where leavened food items are burned on the morning ahead of Passover.

There's a bigly sprinkling of theological references of the sort designed to pander to devotees of portentous Henry's ability to parade pompously his book larnin'///

The most just constitution the world had ever seen
For centuries after the fall of Rome, the Exodus’s political implications lay dormant, confined to the small, harshly persecuted Jewish community. It took the Protestant Reformation to recover the Exodus narrative as a political text. The catalytic moment came in Geneva, where John Calvin preached his famous Deuteronomy sermons in the 1550s, devoting fully 22 weeks to Moses’s speeches at the edge of Canaan. For Calvin, Moses was not primarily a wonderworker but a lawgiver: the author of the most just constitution the world had ever seen, in which the subjects’ duty to obey depended on the ruler’s obedience to law.
Calvin’s followers drew conclusions he never dared articulate. They fused the Exodus covenant with older constitutional traditions to argue that a ruler who violated his covenant obligations could be resisted and deposed.
The greatest English voice in this tradition was John Milton. Writing in 1644, he cast England itself as a new Israel – a covenanted people called to bring freedom to the world. If England was the “nation chosen before any other”, it was surely so that “out of her, as out of Sion, should be sounded forth the trumpet of reformation”.
The consequences for the British constitutional tradition were momentous. Magna Carta, sealed in 1215, had played almost no constitutional role for centuries. Then suddenly, between 1581 and 1616, it burst on to the scene, championed by often Puritan lawyers who saw no distinction between freedom of conscience and freedom from arbitrary power.

The reptiles interrupted with a truly bizarre visual distraction, Runnymede in Surrey, where the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.

Couldn't they dig up a meaningful snap of the actual document?

As for the rest, the pond likes to keep its theology and its constitutional arguments simple ...

Catholic Clergyman: It's the foundation of our belief that Christ is most properly referred to as the Son of God. It's the Son of God who takes the sins of the world upon himself, so that the rest of God's children, we imperfect beings, through faith, may enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Eddie Mannix: So, God is - split?
Catholic Clergyman: Yes! And no.
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: There is unity in division.
Protestant Clergyman: And division in unity.
Eddie Mannix: I'm not sure I follow padre.
Rabbi: Young man, you don't follow for a very simple reason. These men are screwballs.

By this point, Our Henry sounded like he was expecting to be swept up in a constitutional rapture by this Sunday, a kind of new rising from the dead ...

The pre-eminent figure in giving these ideas a coherent intellectual basis was John Selden (1584-1654), simultaneously an outstanding English common lawyer and the foremost political Hebraist in Europe – a Christian scholar who was a magnificent translator of Talmudic commentary.
Selden placed the notion of a covenant between rulers and the ruled at the heart of English political and legal theory. Law was not the command of the sovereign; it was the accumulated wisdom of the community, binding even on kings because it preceded any act of regal will. And the common law was its embodiment and glory.
The Puritan settlers who crossed the Atlantic carried that covenantal vision with them. They saw themselves as a new Israel, their journey an Exodus, the ocean the Red Sea. John Winthrop, addressing his fellow passengers aboard the Arbella in 1630, invoked the Exodus in urging them to discard the corruptions they were leaving behind: “So He carried the Israelites into the wilderness and made them forgette the fleshpotts of Egipt.”
The Mayflower Compact the settlers signed was not a constitution in the modern sense. It was a covenant: a mutual commitment, made in the presence of God, to form “a city upon a hill”, a body politic enacting laws for the general good. Community preceded government, and government derived its authority from the community’s consent.
Those institutions became the experience of self-governance for the makers of the American Revolution. By then the Exodus connection was ubiquitous: asked about the Great Seal of the United States, Benjamin Franklin immediately suggested “Moses lifting up his Wand, and dividing the Red Sea, and Pharaoh, in his Chariot overwhelmed with the Waters.”
On Sinai’s foundations Britain forged the rule of law; the United States infused it with the spirit of democracy.

It wouldn't be a genuine contribution to the Australian Daily Zionist News without the following ...

Remember, Islamophobia is never far from the surface in Our Henry and in The Australian Daily Zionist News ...

By contrast, Islam
Set against that tradition, the Exodus’s Islamic reception is striking. Moses is the most frequently mentioned prophet in the Koran, appearing 136 times, far more than Mohammed himself. Yet Exodus’s significance follows a logic diametrically opposed to its reception in Judaism and post-Reformation Christianity.
In Judaism, the Exodus is the founding event of a people; in Protestantism, it became the template for constitutional liberty. In Islam, by contrast, it serves primarily as a prefiguration of Mohammed’s superior prophethood, before which even Moses recedes.
The result is that the covenant has never possessed, in Islamic political thought, the explosive emancipatory power it acquired in the West. Instead, authority flows downward from God, not upward from a consenting community.
Brilliant 19th-century Islamic reformers – Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, the Young Ottomans – and their liberal successors tried to derive a Koranic basis for constitutional government. Al-Afghani himself lamented that Muslim thought had fallen into taqlid – blind deference to inherited authority.
But they were working against the grain. Their tradition had no Reformation recovery of the Sinai covenant, no Puritan-common law alliance, no Mayflower Compact. Precarious and institutionally unrooted, the constitutionalism they promoted collapsed under the onslaught of secular authoritarianism on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalism on the other.
The example of Islam makes plain that what is at stake is not antiquarian curiosity. It is the survival of a distinctly Western political inheritance whose foundations we have largely forgotten – and that is under assault.
The ancient Greeks were right: the antonym for truth is forgetfulness. When it triumphs, truth dies. The truth being lost is this: the Exodus did not merely inspire institutions. It shaped a way of thinking about power – that authority is conditional, that it must answer to law and that citizens are not mere subjects but participants, with rights and duties, sharing a community of tradition and destiny.
Not just remembrance, but education
That way of thinking cannot be assumed. It must be taught, relearnt and defended. That is why Jews treasure the Passover Seder. It is not simply a ritual of remembrance; it is a ritual of education based on a pedagogy that embraces, rather than suppresses, disagreement.
The central ritual obligation in the Seder is triggered not by a priest or a scholar but by a child’s question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The adult’s duty is not to answer authoritatively but to respond in a way that generates further inquiry. The narrative must be argued over, not just recited. As the evening ends, the participants must feel that they themselves, not their ancestors centuries ago, had been brought out of Egypt.

Just to rub it in ... Families celebrate the Passover Eve dinner at a festive table in an underground shelter, in Ramat Gan, Israel, on April 1.

Look, we can all come together, we can all agree ...

Eddie Mannix: As for the religious aspect, does the depiction of Christ Jesus cut the mustard?
Catholic Clergyman: Well, the nature of Christ is not quite as simple as your photoplay would have it.
Eddie Mannix: How so, father?
Catholic Clergyman: It's not the case, simply, that Christ is God or God - Christ.
Rabbi: You can say that again! The Nazarene was not God.
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: He was not not God.
Rabbi: He was a man.
Protestant Clergyman: Part God.
Rabbi: No, sir!
Eddie Mannix: Rabbi, all of us have a little bit of God in us, don't we?

Gentlemen, please...

Protestant Clergyman: God loves everyone!
Catholic Clergyman: God is love!
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: God is who he is.
Rabbi: This is special? Who isn't who he is?
Catholic Clergyman: But, how should God be rendered in a motion picture?
Rabbi: God isn't in the motion picture!

What about the action?

Eddie Mannix: We don't want to send it to market except in the certainty that it will not offend any reasonable American, regardless of faith or creed. Now that's where you come in. You've read the script; I wanna know if the theological elements of the story are up to snuff.
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: I thought the chariot scene was fakey. How is he going to jump from one chariot to the other, going full speed?

Final thoughts?

Eddie Mannix: We don't need to agree on the nature of the deity here. If we could focus on the Christ, whatever his parentage. My question is: is our depiction fair?
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: I have seen worse.
Eddie Mannix: Reverend?
Protestant Clergyman: There's nothing to offend a - reasonable man.
Eddie Mannix: Father?
Catholic Clergyman: The motion picture teleplay was respectful and exhibited tastefulness and class.
Rabbi: Who made you an expert all of the sudden?
Eddie Mannix: And, what do you think, Rabbi?
Rabbi: Eh? I haven't an opinion.

Thank you, Rabbi Henry, but don't be modest, you always have an opinion ...

Sock it to us in a final gobbet of Zionist glory ...

Beneath that insistence lies a deeper truth: freedom is never self-sustaining. It depends on habits that have to be cultivated and preserved. If those habits weaken, the institutions built upon them crumble.
We are living through such a moment. The language of rights is invoked by those who would use them to bury the rights of others. The language of duties is reviled. Authority is dismissed outright. Reasoned disagreement gives way to a cancel culture that masquerades under the banner of freedom of expression.
To remember the Exodus, then, is not merely to honour a distant past. It is to recall the conditions of our own freedom – and to pledge, as we do at the Seder, to cherish and renew its foundations.
There may come a time, God forbid, when children no longer know how to ask why we gather on that night and parents no longer know how to answer. But for so long as Judaism survives – with its love of questions over answers, of debate over conformity, of learning over ignorance – Passover will teach generation after generation the joy of inquiry, the virtue of wisdom and, most of all, humanity’s inextinguishable quest for freedom on this Earth.

And so constitutional democracy carries on its warrior ways, with the full blessing of Rabbi Henry ...

And with that, another oldie, a real test of what the google bot will tolerate ...

In which the bromancer lowers the tone and the swishing Switzer continues his rehabilitation tour and the rest is teaser trailers ...

 

Only in King Donald's America:

We were horrible in Vietnam until we did Thunder One – Rolling Thunder One and Rolling Thunder Two, and then we won.

We were horrible in Afghanistan and Iraq until we did surge ops, and then we won. Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) (Mediaite)

So much winning. If only he hadn't had those baleful bonespurs, King Donald could have been part of that glorious victory which produced incredible footage of the fall of Hanoi (recorded, it should be remembered, by Australia's own war correspondent Neil Davis, though for some strange reason he imagined he was the only western cameraman filming in Saigon in 1975).

Speaking of horrible ... the current excursion rolled on, but the reptiles were obsessed with the home front ...

They desperately tried to stay up to the minute by holding out hope that there was a new regime of moderates in power ready to do the deal, a deal, any deal, provided the deal was done quickly ...

The pond thinks King Donald's current strategy is positively Lincoln-esque or even Churchillian.

The pond vividly remembers the time when Lincoln made a national address advising the South if they just held on for a couple more weeks, victory would be theirs, and who forget Churchill's memorable speech advising Adolf they certainly saw no reason to fight them on the beaches or defend the English channel. (It's not just Americans who can warp the historical record for AI's benefit)

Naturally the bromancer invoked this spirit of Lincoln in his take ...

The header: This was no Gettysburg Address, more Dame Edna on a bad night; The Albanese government is as empty of policy ambition as any government we’ve ever seen in Canberra. It will never willingly pay any political price to secure a good policy outcome.

The caption: Anthony Albanese after a prerecorded address to the nation in his office at Parliament House, Canberra, on Wednesday. Picture: AAP

Poor bromancer. This day the lizard Oz's Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches could only manage a feeble two minute splutter ...

The Prime Minister’s address to the nation reflected the character of his whole prime ministership – short, tactical, small ‘p’ political, pretty hollow if not altogether vacuous, and nothing to offer but surface blandness and a fistful of dollars, or in this case 26c a litre off the price of petrol.
Apart from making sure the biggest number of people possible get to hear about the government putting cash in people’s pockets through the temporary cut in the fuel excise, it’s all but impossible to discern any real purpose in Anthony Albanese’s remarks.
A prime ministerial address to the nation should be a solemn affair, certainly offering reassurance but also a way forward in national policy and resolve. But the Albanese government is as empty of policy ambition as any government we’ve seen in Canberra.
This government will never willingly pay any political price to secure a good policy outcome.
The gravity of the national crisis we face is mocked by the bland emptiness of the PM’s address. The Iran war should necessitate four urgent debates – our lack of oil, gas and fertiliser security; our acute fiscal delinquency and exposure as increasingly a high-debt country; our general inability to mobilise as a nation in the face of any external crisis because we lack relevant capabilities; and our woeful lack of any defence muscle.

No mention of the real villains who have produced this grave national crisis, just a dumping on Albo ...The PM addresses Australians as the nation braces for what he describes as an unprecedented global crisis.

The Reichsmarschall couldn't do anything because of his lack of kit ...

Thus we couldn’t send navy ships to help clear the Strait of Hormuz if we wanted to because we don’t have modern warships equipped to handle simultaneous missile and drone attacks, much less modern mine-clearing vessels.

And what of King Donald and his minions, and their contribution to the new strategy of "we broke it, you own it"?

The pond couldn't help but scrape this from last night's Colbert monologue ...

Some days the pond wonders if the Pope's a Catholic, other days whether the bromancer is one of them, or just a war monger whose prayers for the kit to wage war in the straits should be rejected ...

These glaring inadequacies all reflect the supply side strangulation we’ve imposed across our economy.
We don’t produce our own fuel, we can’t transport our own cargo, we don’t process or transform the vast natural resources we possess, we are so expensive and suffer such dismal productivity that no manufacturing enterprise would locate itself in Australia without massive government subsidies.
This is completely unsustainable. And history teaches a bitter lesson – if a situation is unsustainable, it won’t be indefinitely sustained.
Yet the Albanese broadcast addressed none of this. There was not a speck of recognition of the deep structural reforms we need to undertake to build national resilience.
There is an embarrassing quality to this address – so bland and banal that you would think it had been written by Barry Humphries as a parody of Australian mediocrity. This was no Gettysburg Address, more Dame Edna on a bad night.

The complete cheek - scribbling that prepper isolationist tosh for a rag that's an outpost of an American corporate empire...

There's got to be a 'toon to celebrate where that sort of yearning for the chance to join in the excursion might take us..

Beyond the valley of the pathetic...

... but how lucky is the pond that the intermittent archive continues to be broken, and so the pond can avoid petulant Peta, always a Thursday blight ...

That's more than enough of a teaser trailer for those wanting to know what they missed.

The pond couldn't give two hoots about the hapless Victorian Liberal party, paying endlessly for their importation of bizarre far right Xians and transphobic warriors.

The nub of PP's piece was transphobia and bigotry, and naturally petulant Peta was deeply sympathetic to the bigot in chief, a troublemaking troll intent on destroying any hint of moderation (all the more comical because a moderate "liberal" in Victoria is usually to the far right of Genghis Khan):

...Deeming is the upper house Liberal MP who helped to organise a women’s rights rally in 2023 that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis; who was accused by her then leader, John Pesutto, of herself being a neo-Nazi sympathiser; who was subsequently expelled from the Liberal partyroom, only successfully to sue Pesutto for defamation; and who was then readmitted to the partyroom and promoted – only to be beaten last weekend for preselection by a serial candidate accused of ethnic branch-stacking. Who was then dumped as the endorsed candidate himself for giving a convicted pedophile a glowing pre-sentence personal reference despite knowing what it was for and subsequently denying that he’d done so.
You cannot make this stuff up, can you?
There are recent precedents where head office has simply endorsed candidates, but instead of doing this with Deeming – beaten by someone who should never have been allowed to run – the Victorian Liberal Party has now called for a fresh preselection with nominations to close at noon on Thursday.
Already, moderates are hitting the phones to marshal the ousted Dinesh Gourisetty’s bloc of votes against Deeming, so it is hard to see that she will face a fair fight. Gourisetty, it should be noted, donated to Pesutto’s legal defence, as disclosed in the latest parliamentary returns (as did Heath Williams and former MP Louise Staley, who both publicly abused Deeming online this week).
Right now, Deeming is considering her position, unsure whether to give the Libs one last chance to treat her fairly or to walk, perhaps to join One Nation, a party that would welcome her with open arms, as a conservative woman who has become a hero to everyone who thinks trans rights should not trump women’s rights.

Update: Huzzah, the intermittent archive is back. It's very slow and constipated, but it can help out those who want the whole bloody mess...

The pond usually avoids transphobic bigots, but couldn't resist this 'toon comment:

(More from Dudley Dursley at The Independent)

Speaking of the batty fair right, Jack the Insider attempted to cope with a cop killer in a bog standard way, by reverting to Ned, the real one, not the fake ones that scribble for the lizard Oz:

The pond apologises for the bittiness sans archive, but the pond has about as much time for sov cits as it does for Victorian liberal party loons.

Eventually Jack got around to noting that in fact it was a movement deeply embedded in the far right, and therefore in sympathy with Pauline, Barners and the lizard Oz's radical agendas:

...On ABC radio on Tuesday, Anthony Albanese faced criticism for stating it was “good” that Freeman had been killed.
Meanwhile, there was nowt but an eerie silence from Pauline Hanson and One Nation. The second rising of the PHON souffle has brought with it a substantial boost to the party’s membership.
Many of those self-identifying financial members of PHON were active on X declaring without evidence that Freeman was murdered by police or offering some twisted justification for Freeman’s calculated crimes.
A clear statement from the One Nation leader denouncing Freeman and offering support for police would be the best way to settle those concerns.
For much of the past seven months the media has attempted to define the sovereign citizen phenomenon, often in a confusing and unhelpful way. Suffice to say, those who hold these views have been taught that the state is illegitimate and its foot soldiers are the enemy. Often falsely described as doomsday preppers who largely keep to themselves, sovereign citizens sanction and promote violence against their communities.
The movement’s influencers use a grab bag of pseudo-legal concepts. Some argue Australia’s Constitution is invalid because it was not ratified by the UK parliament (untrue) while others claim the Australia Act (1986), which severed the remaining legal ties with the UK, was unconstitutional (also untrue). A lot of legal cherrypicking goes on. Some sov-cits cling to concepts in 17th-century Portuguese maritime law. Regardless, the view is that the state has no jurisdiction over the individual and thus taxes are not payable, fines can be ignored and, at its most deranged, police and members of the public are fair game.
The sovereign citizen movement began in the 1980s in the US midwest. 

And this is why you might be better off to reverting to the wiki on the subject:

The movement appeared in the U.S. in the early 1970s and has since expanded to other countries; the similar freeman on the land movement emerged during the 2000s in Canada before spreading to other Commonwealth countries.

Out by a decade or so Jack.

And again ...

The sovereign citizen movement originated from a combination of tax protester ideas, 1960s–70s radical and racist anti-government movements and pseudolaw, which has existed in the U.S. since at least the 1950s. The movement's belief in the illegitimacy of federal income tax gradually expanded to challenging the legitimacy of the government.
The concept of a "sovereign citizen" whose rights are unfairly denied appeared in 1971 within the Posse Comitatus as part of the teachings of Christian Identity minister William Potter Gale. The Posse Comitatus, whose name derived from the historical militias led by local sheriffs, was a far-right, anti-government movement that denounced income tax, debt-based currency, and debt collection as tools of Jewish control over the United States. The roots of the sovereign citizen movement were thus strongly associated with white supremacist and antisemitic ideologies. Gale's racist beliefs were far from unique, but he innovated by devising a "legal" philosophy about the government's illegitimacy. Posse Comitatus members used the term "sovereign citizens" to convey the idea that they were entitled to enforce their interpretation of the Constitution.
After originating in that particular group, the sovereign citizen concept went on to influence the broader tax protester and Christian Patriot movements. Until the 1990s, observers primarily classified the Posse Comitatus as a tax-protest movement rather than an outright far-right extremist group. The Posse Comitatus, Christian Identity, and militia movements did not fully overlap, but they shared members and influenced one another. (see the wiki for the footnotes)

Yes, it's the hippies and bloody weird Xians again, never a good mix.

And the Xians can now count the likes of the bloodthirsty Pete Kegsbreath amongst their white nationalist membership.

Jack tried to cope by ignoring the Xian component:

..It was a two-way con and remains so. Sov-cit influencers would travel from town to town charging susceptible and financially vulnerable people the price of entry to the town hall meetings. Those who chose to take up the legal mumbo jumbo then would be charged an additional fee to receive worthless documents and dismal instructions.
This led to a whirlwind of tax fraud, and desperate farmers in the US being convicted and sentenced to long spells in prison. In 2015 the FBI declared the movement a domestic terror group. Fraudsters and charlatans were replaced with gun-toting nihilists.
There are various hubs of the movement around Australia, including in the wheat belt district around Geraldton in Western Australia, 400km due north of Perth. Sov-cits bob up with alarming frequency in the courts in the Northern Rivers region of NSW, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland in Queensland and in Freeman’s old stomping grounds in Victoria’s Alpine district.
It is these people who radicalise others that police and intelligence agencies should be keeping an eye on. They are the nihilistic equivalent to Islamist hate preachers.
The Islamists may offer greater risks to the community but they have structure and organisation, making it easier to prohibit one group or another. The sovereign citizen movement is amorphous and dislocated. In some places the movement is restricted to relatively harmless idiots who choke up the courts with pseudo-law nonsense. Others demand violence in internet echo chambers directly to the gullible.
The greatest concern is not that Freeman may have received assistance from people of like mind in the sovereign citizen space but the sheer number of people who regard him in life and now in death as a hero.

Oh Jack, Jack, does that small bunch of weirdos in any way compare to the sheer number of people who watch Faux Noise, and have King Donald as their hero, a hero who accepts the advice of the Emeritus Chairman that an Iranian excursion might be a golly good vacation? (The archive clapped out again, please leave a link in the comments if you get it working

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fwhy-sovcits-cast-dezi-freeman-as-a-hero%2Fnews-story%2Fc09baaaae91c8fdb77a94e75e1c7a433?amp).

And speaking of naughty boys, so to the swishing Switzer, who lost his cool this day, while still on his extended rehabilitation tour ...

The header: I love America but this President is a detestable figure; Rarely, if ever, has the US stumbled so swiftly to the brink of a disaster, and done so despite clear warnings of the risks involved.

The caption for the King: President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters after signing an executive order in the Oval Office. Picture: Alex Brandon / AP Photo

That image has to be worth a 'toon ...

The swishing Switzer was careful to make sure he didn't tread on too many reptile toes, and so opened by paying cautious homage to the bromancer ...

I have long admired America – its power, its ideals and its central role in underwriting the global order. I have no time for what Greg Sheridan calls reflexive anti-Americanism. I want the US to thrive. Its success matters to the world – and to Australia.

Oh dear, that could only mean a giant billy goat butt was coming, and the swishing Switzer let it rip ...

Yet I have reached a deeply uncomfortable conclusion: the current President is a detestable, pitiable figure whose reckless conduct over Iran will have damaging consequences. Rarely, if ever, has the US stumbled so swiftly to the brink of a disaster – and done so despite clear warnings of the risks involved.
The Iran debacle reflects not only Donald Trump’s poor judgment but also his impulsive intervention abroad, untethered from clear objectives or a coherent definition of success. This was a President who devoted barely one minute to Iran in a two-hour State of the Union address days before launching this war. Yet, when presented with a rare opportunity to strike at the regime’s leadership, he acted without any serious regard for the likely consequences.

And ditto the Emeritus Chairman who encouraged the excursion?

Let's not get too racial ... A resident weeps while talking on the phone near a residential building that was hit in an airstrike in the west of Tehran, Iran. Picture: Majid Saeedi / Getty Images

The pond always marvels at the way that the reptiles can ignore their US kissing cousins and cheerleaders in chief at Faux Noise ...

Before February 28, Tehran’s leverage over global energy markets was contained; it sat astride the Strait of Hormuz, controlling a mere 4-5 per cent of the world’s energy exports – essentially its own output.
Now the consequences may be far graver. Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz means its influence could extend over as much as 20 per cent of global energy flows. Factor in the Houthis’ ability to disrupt commercial shipping in the Red Sea, and close to a third of the world’s energy supply could fall under Iranian-aligned control – an astonishing and wholly avoidable strategic reversal.
Let’s be clear: the US-Israeli strike all but guaranteed retaliation. A regime that once exercised its leverage with caution is now acting as if it faces an existential crisis – which, from Tehran’s perspective, it does.
It is exploiting its strategic position to disrupt vital arteries of global commerce. And Washington’s allies, never consulted before the February 28 operation, are left to absorb the economic and strategic shockwaves.
Increasingly, Trump appears to be operating in a world of his own making. There are no direct talks with Iran, only faint, indirect contacts through intermediaries. And the Iranians, in no hurry to negotiate, are content to let Trump dangle in the wind – a spectator to a process he neither controls nor fully understands. At the same time, Trump is now so deeply enmeshed we are told he must stay the course, finish the job and topple the regime. If that requires ground troops, so be it.
The notion that the US could topple or subdue the regime with 10,000 or 20,000 troops is fanciful.

Switzer was interrupted by a snap of King Donald and war minion Kegsbreath ... US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and US President Donald Trump walk to board Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. Picture: Jim Watson / AFP

Credit for this rehabilitation tour. At least the swishing Switzer didn't take the bromancer's easy way out with cheap jibes about Lincoln and Dames (as if the pond would ever joke about a Dame Slap or a Dame Groan) ...

Iraq required more than 200,000 personnel to conquer and occupy a smaller, less populous country. Iran, with a population of more than 90 million – nearly twice that of Iraq – and a landmass almost four times as large, would be an altogether more formidable challenge. To embark on such a venture without overwhelming force, clear objectives and any real public support in an election year is not strategy; it is madness.
Some have floated the idea of seizing Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil terminal. But even if tactically successful, it would solve little. Holding it would be difficult; destroying it – along with the desalination plants Trump has threatened to target unless a deal is reached before April 6 – would amplify the global economic shock.
Others point to precision raids to seize Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. But these facilities are buried, fortified and heavily defended – in many cases beyond the reach of conventional strikes. Any such operation would be immensely complicated and fraught with risk.
We should be angry. Trump is not our President; Australians did not vote for him. Yet we will bear the consequences of his reckless decisions: rising inflation, soaring petrol prices and the looming threat of fuel shortages.
We are paying for a war that was never properly planned. The goals – preventing Iran from going nuclear, perhaps even regime change – are noble. But to say again: there was no credible plan for what would follow the strikes, no thought for keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, no preparation for the economic shockwaves now rippling towards us.

Inevitably Albo turned up ... Anthony Albanese during Question Time. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

And the swishing Switzer had some splendid advice for him.

Keep tugging the forelock ... apparently on the basis of recent revelations about the quarry puppy killer's partner, King Donald might like a little cross-dressing of the bimbo or the Dame Everage kind ...

Yet anger is not a policy. Australia will soon find itself in a far more precarious position: short of fuel and increasingly dependent on others – the result of our crazy reliance on imported energy, compounded by our failure to reinvigorate domestic exploration and production.
Our Asian partners will help where they can but they cannot supply what they do not have. In a tight market, goodwill is no substitute for capacity. Our liquefied natural gas and coal will be in high demand, but any gains may be offset by the cost of securing the fuel we lack. Access will depend not only on our ability to pay but also on the willingness of key suppliers – above all the US – to prioritise our needs over others.
The cold hard reality demands diplomatic dexterity. However justified our criticism of the Iran misadventure, our leaders cannot afford to antagonise Trump. He is, after all, notoriously sensitive to slights and inclined to view alli­ances in personal, transactional terms. The national interest requires that we remain in a position to call on American support if circumstances deteriorate.
Australians are entitled to be upset by Trump’s conduct.
But these are not conditions in which we can indulge the comfort of outrage. In the end, prudence must prevail because we may yet find ourselves dependent on the power we most wish had acted differen­tly.
Tom Switzer is presenter of Switzerland, a podcast about politics, modern history and international relations.

Prudence, dear prudence is all ... won't you come out to play? Just ask the infallible Pope...

And so to a final teaser trailer because Marriott of The Times had been imported, and dressed up with a terrible stock photo opening image...

Because the pond was triggered by this, the pond decided to offer the rest as plain text:

...In my adolescence a smartphone was an incontestably glamorous object; the best indicator of prosperous and indulgent parents. And to teenagers in suburban Newcastle even a Twitter account signalled a certain cosmopolitan savoir-faire – what better sign of sophistication than an acquaintance with the moment-by-moment musings of Sir Stephen Fry?
Now everyone has a smartphone. And a social media habit, to judge by the popularity of the slang words slop and brainrot, no longer signals smart thinking. As we become more attuned to the deceits of online life, the kind of person who constantly posts about their holidays or career no longer seems desirable but rather desperate. A certain mysterious absence is the classier move.
After Christmas a friend remarked to me: “This year no one had their phones out at all and we talked about how this was something of a new decorum.” Some of his family, he suspected, now viewed mindless scrolling as “common”. Doubtless, many middle-class people are sincerely concerned about declining IQ and the teenage mental health crisis, but I think restricting your phone use may also work as a subtle status signal. Perhaps as a sign of willpower. Perhaps it shows you are in the know: you have read Jonathan Haidt; you subscribe to the kind of broadsheet newspaper that runs articles about “digital detoxes”.
Economically, at least, smartphone dependency is a sign of low status. It has sometimes been observed that the major divide in modern employment is whether you work “above or below the API” – the application programming interface.
Do you issue instructions to software or do you take instructions from software? Uber drivers, Deliveroo bikers and other workers in the digital precariat live at the mercy of their phones. The shrill ping of a delivery app is the 21st-century factory hooter. The higher you are in the economic hierarchy, the less likely you are to be fired if you don’t leap into action at the prompting of an app.
Importantly, middle-class status has long been defined by an ethic of ostentatious self-denial.
Think of those prosperous burghers of Amsterdam in the paintings of Rembrandt, the world’s first international capitalists, dressed not in purple robes but in sober black. In an age of abundant calories, you express your status more effectively through veganism and marathons than through obesity. It is not impossible to imagine that the statusful middle-class activities of the future will be book clubs, maths olympiads and tech fasts.
Even those middle-class parents who are unable to tame their own phone addictions now control their children’s screen time with hypochondriac vigilance. According to a recent New York Times report, you can lose your job as a nanny to an American upper-bourgeois family if you so much as look at your own phone screen in the presence of the child.
This environment is a major change from the atmosphere of unreflecting technological utop­ian­ism in which most adults were raised. It may be that in the coming decades the children of the upper middle classes will not be able to touch their phones without a twinge of the information-age equivalent of Catholic guilt. Another piece in The New York Times followed a cohort of university students giving up their phones. These students, obviously, were not studying at their local state universities but at an exclusive liberal arts college.
This is not to endorse snobbery, only to observe that status competition is an important driver of cultural change. Throughout history baby names, table manners and habits of dress have trickled down through society. The prospect of a zombified tech-addicted future is eminently possible.
But if we ever do manage to break the grip of the smartphone on human attention, I suspect the story will be as much about status as about legislation.
Though I suspect my own dream of an indoor scrolling ban remains elusive.
The Times

Good luck with all that, and this is probably not the right time to confess that the pond has never ever used Uber, and nor has it ever made a food delivery order of any kind.

Hold on a nervous tick, did the pond say that this was the last teaser trailer?

The pond should at least note that the meretricious Merritt was out and about ...

The pond won't go on with him, he's always a stupendous bore, and his conclusion was suitably boring ...

...There is one more issue. In support of its campaign, news.com.au cited the appalling treatment of Diane Lucas, administrator of the Canberra Rape Crisis Centre, who was jailed for refusing to hand over a rape survivor’s counselling notes when served with a subpoena.

But this predates Shaw’s 1997 legislation.

Robyn Gilbert, a senior solicitor with Legal Aid’s Sexual Assault Communications Privilege Service, outlined the Lucas prosecution for the NSW Judicial Officers’ Bulletin in February last year.

She wrote that after Lucas’s jailing in 1995, “calls for reform followed and in 1997 the (NSW) parliament created the sexual assault communications privilege”.

This history is important. Our criminal justice system has rightly addressed an imbalance that previously existed, where sexual assault survivors often faced aggressive cross-examination and significant barriers to conviction.

Now, we have a careful balance between the rights of accuser and defendant. Only by maintaining this equilibrium can we ensure our system is fair.

What's really notable about all that?

It's yet another attempt by the reptiles at the lizard Oz to pour cold water on a news.com.au campaign?

Note the way that the meretricious Merritt contends that the news.com.au campaign is "fraught">

Are the reptiles miffed about being beaten by the allegedly more "liberal" website? 

Is it another shot across the bows, in a war already noted by the venerable Meade last week in Murdoch mastheads at odds?

Whatever, and as usual, the pond will tune in to the Weekly Beast tomorrow to see what's what in reptile land.

For the moment, time to end with the news that Doonesbury still survives in a weekly format, and went on that march ...

Put it another way ...

The pond has no idea if anyone actually watches these on the deliberately smart phone unfriendly pond, but whatever, they amuse the pond ...

News from America ...

And news from Britain trying to cope with America ... wasn't Brexit an absolutely spiffing idea?