In which the Caterist and Major Mitchell lead the climate science denying, renewables bashing way. Yawn!

 

The pond recently noticed this piece by Arianne Shahvisi in the LRB headed Gamer’s Dilemma (*intermittent archive link)

Shahvisi started off this way ...

In a strong field of contenders, the most morally troubling computer game ever made is probably RapeLay, released in Japan in 2006. Players are required to adopt the role of a sex offender who must stalk and rape a woman and her daughters, aged 12 and 17. It was banned in the UK in 2009 and eventually removed from sale in Japan too. The game spurred a debate among academic philosophers, centred on the ‘gamer’s dilemma’, a conceit formulated by Morgan Luck. Why is virtual killing morally acceptable in computer games, Luck asked, while virtual child sex abuse is not, given that no real person is harmed in either case?

... but quickly honed in on a more important dilemma ...

...If there are rumours that you’ve sexually abused a child, waging an expensive, unpopular, illegal war, let alone one whose opening salvo kills more than a hundred little girls, seems a strange bid at reputation laundering. But Trump is relying on the wonky moral arithmetic that produces the gamer’s dilemma, plus the racial supremacy that drives all Western foreign policy: the suspicion that he abused a white girl is a threat to his legitimacy in a way that the documented obliteration of a school of brown girls is not.
The inconsistency crops up again in the apologies that have spread like a rash among powerful men in Epstein’s orbit: they are sorry, they didn’t know, they hope for justice. Bill Clinton regrets his friendship. Does he regret obliterating Sudan’s malaria drugs and IV fluids? There is much to regret. Epstein was into everything: sexual abuse, eugenics, settler colonialism. He made donations to the Israeli Defence Forces and the Jewish National Fund, which finances illegal settlements on Palestinian land.
There is an audio recording of Epstein’s friend Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, telling the financier that he had told Vladimir Putin that Israel needed a million Russian Jews to ‘control the quality’ of the population, given the growing numbers of Palestinians and racialised Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, adding the sweetener that ‘many young, beautiful girls would come, tall and slim.’ Barak ‘regrets’ his links to Epstein. Does his regret his role as the defence minister who ordered the killing of 1400 Palestinians, including more than three hundred children, in Israel’s Operation Cast Lead?
The apologies from those linked to Epstein are grubby, suspect, insufficient. But they display a deference to the terms of some kind of morality: it is never OK to sexually abuse a child and it is very bad to be associated with those who do. Is it OK to kill a child? To associate with those who do? What about twenty thousand children? Will we ever see apologies from those whose friends have blown the limbs off children in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran? The discrepancy that drives the gamer’s dilemma doesn’t come from our rightful horror at paedophilia – virtual or real – but from our complacency about so much murder.

It made the pond wonder. 

Nearly all refugees admitted in US since October 2025 were (white) South Africans, data shows...

No need to wonder, but will the pond - or the hive mind - ever see apologies from News Corp and its minions, who have enabled and encouraged ethnic cleansing and the killing fields and the white Xian nationalism?

Probably not, but it explains why the pond frequently feels the need to apologise for presenting reprehensible reptiles to an admittedly discreet and worldly wise bunch of correspondents ...

And so we begin again this day with some great news, though it was too late in the morning for those on the extreme far right of the rag to contemplate said BREAKING news ...

BREAKING
‘Painful’: Hungary’s Orban ousted in historic poll defeat
The long-serving Hungarian Prime Minister has conceded defeat, telling supporters: ‘The result of the election is clear and painful.’
By Jacquelin Magnay

So the onion muncher's and Vlad the Sociopath's and JD Vance's friend has gone down? 

There's probably gong to be a sting in the tail somewhere down the line, but the pond will settle for a rush of joy.

Meanwhile there was other "news" in the "news" section of the lizard Oz...

Middle East at war
Trump announces US to blockade Strait of Hormuz
US President Donald Trump said the US Navy would begin blockading ‘any and all ships trying to enter or leave the Strait of Hormuz’, after peace talks with Iran in Islamabad collapsed.
By Jack Quail and Agencies

That splash led to a short summary ...

President Donald Trump on Sunday ordered a US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in response to Iran’s “unyielding” refusal to give up its nuclear ambitions during peace talks in Islamabad.
While acknowledging that the marathon talks in Pakistan had gone “well” and “most points were agreed to,” Trump said Tehran had refused to concede on the issue of its nuclear program.
“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
“I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas,” Trump said.

So he intends to plunge the world's economy into a spiral of doom while acting as a common or garden eighteenth century pirate?

Agggh, me hearties.

The pond notes this because in the lizard Oz editorial whining about the recalcitrant Iranians came this corker...

The Tehran regime must understand, if it cares, that there will be no end to Iranians’ suffering, and more devastation until complete freedom of navigation through the Strait is assured. Western nations should be helping the US secure that crucial goal. The importance to the world of reopening the Strait has been underlined by the failure of the Islamabad talks. 

So a compleat BLOCKADE is the way forward, complete freedom is a complete blockage, war is peace, and no doubt chairman Xi will take note.

Perhaps it's just another thought bubble from a mad King, who seems to more and more be favouring Roman Emperors as role models ...

And that's the end of the entertainment because alas, this day the reptiles used the crisis to indulge in yet another round of climate science denialism and fossil fuel worship.

Trust the reptiles always to learn the wrong lesson ...trust the quarry whisperer to lead the way:

The header: The four dates that punctured the left’s net-zero fantasies; As the Trump administration has shown, the net-zero industrial complex must be starved, not slain.

The caption for a snap much used by the reptiles: Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen during a visit to the Ampol Lytton refinery in Brisbane. Picture: NewsWire / Tertius Pickard

The pond will understand if senior herpetology students decide to sneak out of class this time. 

Been there, done that so many times, with a yadda yadda here and a whatever there...

The monomaniacal pursuit of net zero had to be abandoned sooner or later. Politically contaminated science, coupled with the requirement for a watertight global agreement, made it vulnerable to the lightest brush with reality.
Historians may well recall that its demise occurred between February 2022 and April 9, 2026, beginning with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that shut off Russian oil and gas supplies, and destroyed the romance of decarbonisation for hundreds of millions of Europeans.
The second pivotal moment occurred on October 7, 2023, when the global left’s response to mass torture, rape, killing and kidnapping of Israeli men, women and children revealed that Palestine had replaced global warming as its cause de jour.
The US-Israel campaign against Iran that began on February 28, triggering the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, destroyed the delusion that the energy transition was making progress. It turned out that the world was even more dependent on hydrocarbons than it had been 53 years earlier during the last major supply crisis.
In Australia, at least, historians will probably nominate Thursday, April 9, as the day the final nail was hammered into the coffin. It was the day Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese visited the Lytton refinery near the Port of Brisbane, the first visit by a prime minister since May 2021, when Scott Morrison and his then energy minister, Angus Taylor, announced the deal to stop the Ampol refinery moving offshore.

The reptiles flung in a snap of their favourite villain ... Chris Bowen during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond has been zooming around town in the old EV startled by the singular absence of traffic even in peak hour, but refuses to gloat ... while the phantom flood waters analyst carried on in his luddite way..

The PM didn’t want to be seen near the joint this time last year when he was campaigning in the seat of Bonner. Today, however, it’s a different story, even if not every reporter at last week’s press conference was across the government’s revised talking points on fossil fuels. Subject: Loaded Adjectives. Text: Delete “dirty, harmful, and morally indefensible” and insert “reliable, affordable, and prosperity-enabling”.
Asked for an update on the Safeguard Mechanism, Labor’s keynote policy designed to reduce emissions from large industrial facilities such as Lytton, Bowen replied: “It’s not on the top of my to-do list right now, to be frank with you. I’m focused on other matters.”
Bowen may try to dismiss this as a throwaway line, just as he suggests that abandoning the 82 per cent renewables target for the east coast grid is of little consequence. Yet the government’s energy U-turn cannot easily be brushed off.
For four years, the Albanese government has lavished subsidies, raised punitive taxes and increased regulation to reduce fossil fuel demand. Now, as the PM told us after returning from Singapore, the government’s three top priorities are supply, supply and supply.
Just a year ago, Labor delayed approving a major extension of Australia’s largest LNG development until after the election to avoid a backlash from the left. Last week, the PM went cap-in-hand to Singapore, where he used gas from that very project as a bargaining chip to secure imports of petrol, diesel and avgas.

Not content with one Caterist, the reptiles doubled down with him appearing with lovely meter maid Rita (still no rebranding? Must we wait forever for the name?)

Menzies Research Centre Senior Fellow Nick Cater claims reality is catching up with the net zero debate. “Reality is starting to catch up with this debate,” Mr Cater told Sky News host Rita Panahi. “This is crazy modelling; they’ve stuck with it as long as they can.”

There then came some impeccable analysis by the quarry whisperer:

This brazen about-turn carries low political risk for Labor. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy’s 2010 prediction that the intellectual left’s animating cause would be a version of antisemitism has proved correct.
Raising awareness of the climate emergency by gluing oneself to the Harbour Bridge is old-school. Today, one’s social justice credentials are displayed by marching across it in a keffiyeh in the company of an assortment of dubious characters.
The moral force of net zero has diminished. Five years ago, Morrison signed up to the Paris Agreement not because he wanted to but because he was frightened that the Liberal Party’s support would collapse if he didn’t. As it turned out, the Liberals’ vote collapsed anyway. Late last year, the Coalition dropped the commitment to net zero, and almost no one noticed.

Um, perhaps because the coalition has, in following News Corp's lead on climate science, been a rabble whispering into a void, and now such a rump no one notices? Especially as it's a rump led by a beefy boofhead who earned his stripes ranting at windmills?

Correspondents will note that the pond is feeling a tad jaded by all this...

Yet we should not imagine, for a moment, that the change in the political wind means public policy will change course. Bureaucracies do not reverse on command. They carry stored momentum, converted into agencies, grant programs, reporting frameworks, procurement rules and career structures.
The degree of institutional inertia is considerable. Abolishing the Department of Climate Change and Energy, as One Nation promises to do, will do little more than place a line in the sand. The dense undergrowth of quasi-government bodies, regulators, advisory boards and grant recipients will largely remain untouched.

It wouldn't be a campaign ad proper if the mob didn't score a snap...

Leader of the Opposition Angus Taylor MP and Leader of the Nationals Senator Matt Canavan, joined by Liberal and National Party Members and Senators, hold a press conference at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

And that was about it ...

Even if the scalpel were taken to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Clean Energy Regulator, the Renewable Energy Target, the Emissions Reduction Fund and the Climate Change Authority, the real work would scarcely have begun.
Dozens of quangos, commissions, agencies and co-ordinators have been created at state level. Beyond government sits an even wider ecosystem: advocacy groups funded to keep the pressure on, universities with research centres and grants, public broadcasters with specialist climate rounds, and corporations whose incentives are driven by ESG.
Even after the political tide turns, all of this machinery goes on whirring. The momentum is embedded in payrolls, contracts, budgets and careers. The Coalition should take note.
As the Trump administration has shown, the net-zero industrial complex must be starved, not slain. It will be overcome by defunding, deregulation and the exhaustion of capital. NASA’s success in sending astronauts beyond the moon suggests the threat of deep cuts to the agency’s climate-related work is already bearing fruit.
There is no quick fix, however, particularly in a parliamentary system that does not allow an incoming prime minister to exercise the sweeping executive powers of a US president. Democratic correction here will be less dramatic, beginning with the slow bleed of money, status and cultural authority. Net zero will end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

As for the planet? If the Caterist and his companions at the lizard Oz have his way, it will end in the manner of a stuffed and right royally cooked goose ...

As for the rest of the rabble, the pond seized on the chance discovery of the intermittent archive in working mode to send a number of them off to that dismal cornfield.

The pond apologises in advance. It's a risky strategy, a minute by minute proposition, an exercise in frustration, but actually dealing with this mob would be worse.

Nick led the march of the damned ...

The hollow populism of Max Chandler-Mather
The Greens have not broken through but consolidated a niche – and a niche is not a mass movement.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

Whenever the pond reads the tag, Nick Dyrenfurth is executive director of the John Curtin Research Centre, the pond can't help but ask why Nick has turned into a reptile regular. Still pleased to be one of the reptiles ruining the planet, Nick? Still determined to make Curtin keep rolling in his grave.

As usual, there was an obligatory piece about the war with China by Xmas, but instead of the bromancer, it was Rowan ...

Xi is planning a ‘peaceful’ Taiwan deal Trump can accept
When Trump meets Xi in a month, he may believe he holds the upper hand, no longer feeling a need to make concessions.
By Rowan Callick
Contributor

The pond was delighted that Rowan had only yesterday had an intimate discussion with Chairman Xi, and so had intimate knowledge of his plans, but the pond thought it might be better just to wait and see what actually might unfold. 

After all, King Donald has shown the way forward. Blockade!

Brownie was also to hand ...

Tell us strait: there’s nothing wrong in a leader saying sorry
Anthony Albanese should be more prepared to admit mistakes and even issue the occasional apology when he gets it wrong.
By Greg Brown
Chief political correspondent

The pond might have taken Brownie seriously if he'd started with an apology for the unseemly way his boss had encouraged King Donald to embark on the Iran folly, with another apology for the way his kissing cousins at Faux Noise had acted as war mongering cheerleaders. Physician heal thyself, and set the example would have been good starting points for Brownie, but no such like.

As for simpleton Simon, it was just the usual bog standard outing ..

Jim’s ‘voodoo economics’ strikes back
Chalmers has been making all the right noises about not wasting a crisis, but he may be overruled again.
By Simon Benson
Political analys

The pond will wait for Dame Groan's groaning tomorrow ...

And that meant that all that was left was the sorry sight of assorted reptiles seizing on the current crisis to plunge the world back into the days of picket fences and gas guzzlers... including the lizard Oz editorialist...

The editorialist would say that, that's how it works in the hive mind, incessant repetition, incantations and yearning for things to stay the same, as if the climate heeds their monotonous chanting.

Cue Major Mitchell, doing a standard Major five minute rant ...

The header: Oil shock shows world still runs on fossil fuels, not green promises; Environment writers who claim the Iran war oil shock will be a boost for renewable energy don’t understand how industrial production actually works.

The caption: Scottich (sic) First Minister John Swinney launches an SNP campaign on fuel prices on April 7, in Leith, Scotland. Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Yawn.

The best the pond can do is introduce the dramatis personae in this turgid outing, as dull as George Bernard Shaw in full verbiage flight.

The first, a certain Michael Shellenberger, made an appearance in an old Damian Carrington piece for the Graudian, The four types of climate denier, and why you should ignore them all

A new book, described as “deeply and fatally flawed” by an expert reviewer, recently reached the top of Amazon’s bestseller list for environmental science and made it into a weekly top 10 list for all nonfiction titles.
How did this happen? Because, as Brendan Behan put it, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”. In an article promoting his book, Michael Shellenberger – with jaw-dropping hubris – apologises on behalf of all environmentalists for the “climate scare we created over the last 30 years”.
Shellenberger was named a hero of the environment by Time magazine in 2008 and is a loud advocate of nuclear power, but the article was described by six leading scientists as “cherry-picking”, “misleading” and containing “outright falsehoods”.

Sounds exactly like the sort of leading man the Major would love.

There's a lot more that can be found about him on the full to overflowing intertubes, but the short version is that he's a flake and a phoney.

As for the leading woman, some would think that the name alone, Zion Lights, explains everything.

The Major wants to think that she's been largely ignored, a stunning ingenue ready to take leading lady status and dominate centre stage, but in reality she could be found peddling her wares in the 'Tiser way back in October 2021 ...

Extinction Rebellion to climate champion: Zion Lights explains why nuclear power is our answer
A former key official in the Extinction Rebellion movement has revealed why she’s turning her back on its doomsday messages to back nuclear power.

That header alone suggests an explanation, which a metaphor might elucidate: Opus Dei fanatic becomes fanatical atheist, or vice versa, fanatical atheist becomes Opus Dei zealot ...

“I used to be in that kind of camp saying: ‘We should all use less,’ but, actually, let’s be honest, where has that gotten us?
“For decades, it’s gotten us nowhere. It hasn’t happened. Behavioural scientists have not found a way to make people magically to have a huge reduction in how much energy they use.”
Ms Lights argues reducing emissions means increasing electricity use, to transfer transport and heating from fossil fuel power.

Don't ask the pond to explain what that last line actually means. The important point is that Zion saw the Lights and she decided to nuke the planet to save the planet.

With that introduction to the main characters, it's on with the Major ...

Environment writers who claim the Iran war oil shock will be a boost for renewable energy don’t understand how industrial production actually works.
The world spent $US2.5 trillion ($3.55 trillion) on green projects in 2025 alone.
Yet more than 91 per cent of total Australian energy use still relies on fossil fuels. The global figure is more than 82 per cent.
All the renewable energy installed in the past decade has not shielded the world from the effects of the partial blockage of 20 per cent of the world’s oil by Iran in the Straits of Hormuz for only six weeks.
It’s a lesson that should have been learned earlier. Many countries, especially in Europe, accelerated the closure of reliable fossil fuel power after the gas shock triggered by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, thinking more renewables would protect them.
It’s like even governments don’t understand almost every industry globally depends on fossil fuels, from making fertiliser, plastics and cement to smelting metals, refining Avgas for planes, diesel for farm machinery, and trucks and heavy oil for shipping.
Yet environment editor Nick O’Malley in the Nine papers assured his readers on March 19 that the way forward from the present oil crisis was more subsidies for electrification.
O’Malley claimed China was showing the world the way forward without fossil fuels by building more renewables capacity since 2022 than the rest of the world combined. True but China is also the world’s biggest CO2 emitter, largest user of coal and second largest user of oil.
That won’t change any time soon because the green steel, green ammonia and green hydrogen the Nine papers have been spruiking for a decade do not exist.
Sure renewables are becoming the backbone of our electricity system but 80 per cent of our fossil fuel use is in industries other than electricity generation.
And while the world has been spending trillions of dollars a year since Covid building out renewables, it has wound back spending on oil and gas exploration and production.
Mike Shellenberger on the Public website estimates total global spending on oil and gas exploration and production peaked at $US780bn in 2014 and fell to $US350bn by 2020 – a fraction of what is spent on renewables that deliver only a small proportion of global total energy.
Discussing a new book, Abundance, that Labor ministers here have been spruiking, Shellenberger in “Democrats’ Fake ‘Abundance’ Agenda Will Continue Energy Scarcity” on April 5 said the Hormuz crisis showed the world needed to build more oil and gas pipelines.
“The only energy abundance solution that works at the scale of civilisation right now is piping natural gas and oil. A pipeline delivers energy continuously, at near zero marginal cost per unit delivered, with no exposure to shipping choke points, insurance markets or geopolitical disruption.”
Asking why the left continues to push the idea renewables are the solution to industrial processes renewables cannot power, Shellenberger answers, “The first reason is profit. Solar and wind development is an enormously lucrative business, not because the technology is superior but because the subsidies are guaranteed.”
Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated $US370bn to solar, wind and batteries. The EU Green Deal offered a trillion euros.
“The returns are attractive precisely because the government guarantees them.”
This is the model the Albanese government and Minister for Energy Chris Bowen are copying without wondering where the rest of our energy requirement will come from even if we do manage to build an electrical grid on renewables, storage, batteries and gas back-up.
Shellenberger says bankers are the big drivers of support for renewables because every wind farm, solar array and big battery project involves commissions for financial intermediaries brokering deals between manufacturers and power providers.
“Goldman does not profit from cheap, abundant energy delivered through pipelines at near-zero marginal cost. Goldman profits from complex, capital intensive projects that require financing, structuring and advisory fees.”
As this column has argued for a decade, it’s big bankers and financiers preaching the gospel of sustainability who reap the rewards of renewables. Think Malcolm Turnbull and Simon Holmes a Court here.
Shellenberger says China is the other big winner.
“China proliferated cheap solar panels to the West not out of environmental conviction but as an industrial strategy that made Western nations dependant on Chinese manufacturing while China itself relied on the energy source that actually works at scale: coal.
“China burns more than half the world’s coal. It built an electricity grid twice the size of America’s. It stockpiled critical minerals.
“It built coal-to-chemicals facilities to produce diesel and jet fuel domestically and for military needs,” Shellenberger says.
Meanwhile, Australia, the largest exporter of coal to China, plans to shut all its coal power generation plants and places stringent approvals processes in front of any potential new coal mine. Yet Labor claims it is accelerating its Future Made in Australia strategy in response to the present oil crisis.
What of the world’s biggest losers from the renewables transition? That would be the poorest people from the world’s least developed countries.

The pond let the Major ramble on because the reptiles were so zonked on Valium they didn't have the heart to interrupt him with a single visual distraction.

Not one snap of demonic whale-killing windmills? Not one snap of renewables ruining landscapes?

The reptiles did briefly rouse from their slumbers to feature the demonic sun and sinister solar glistening in its evil light ... Bankers are the big drivers of support for renewables because every wind farm, solar array and big battery project involves commissions. Picture: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

Bankers!  Evil bankers!! Possibly even cosmopolitans!!

Some might be wondering when Zion would make her appearance. Worry not, here she is, Lightsing the way ...

Shellenberger on April 1 interviewed Zion Lights, an activist who quit Extinction Rebellion in the UK in 2020 and was quoted in this column about XR’s extreme methods at the time.
Lights has written an important new book, Energy is Life, Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear.
She describes how for the past two decades “climate policy has been the dominant priority in wealthy nations’ engagement with the developing world”.
“Western NGOs have even blocked the construction of hydro-electric dams, which tends to be the first reliable source of power that poor nations develop as they rise the development ladder,” she tells Shellenberger’s podcast.
After the Paris Agreement in 2015, private institutions and national governments “began systematically restricting financing for oil, gas and coal projects in the developing world”.
“The practical effect was to deny poor countries the energy infrastructure that every wealthy nation used to climb out of poverty.
“Between 2017 and 2019, multilateral development banks provided an average $US9.7bn annually in direct fossil fuel finance.
“By 2020-22, that figure had collapsed to $US3.2bn.
“In March 2021, the UK’s export finance agency ended all financial support for overseas fossil fuel projects.”
At COP 26 in Glasgow in November 2021, 20 countries and five development banks pledged to stop financing unabated fossil fuels by the end of 2022
Lights goes on to outline how the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank then began forcing the closure of various fossil fuel projects.
Yet in Africa, 600 million people are living without electricity.
Lights says she has never been interviewed by the BBC. Our ABC, Guardian Australia and Nine papers are just as deaf to thoughtful voices on the realities of energy and environmentalism.

Relax, Zion, your natural home is the hive mind, dwelling amongst the reptiles in fossil fuel bliss ...murmuring all the while about evil bankers, perhaps even the Rothschilds, though that sounds a tad strange coming from the lips of a devoted Zionist of the Major kind ...

Enough already ,,, on with the main show ...

Go, Faux Noise... turn a pig's ear into a pearl right before our disbelieving eyes ...

In which Polonius sets the war crimes pace, the Ughmann takes a warrior sidestep, and Our Henry arrives to seal the war crimes deal ..

 

A word of explanation...

Yesterday this was at the top of the lizard Oz ...

... and the pond studiously ignored it.

First it was by that lesser member of the Kelly gang, Joe, and second, already everything has changed.

If you wanted a third, you could find it in the possibly working intermittent archive ...

If you wanted a fourth, the pond would much rather be reading Susan B. Glasser ranting away in The New Yorker in The Costs of Trump's Iran-War Folly (*archive link)

If you wanted a fifth, the pond much preferred this opening flourish by David Remnick's obvious comparison in his piece Trump's Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran (*archive link)

Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun. He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. He banned dogs from the capital for their “unappealing odor.” He renamed the months: January for himself, April for his mother. He was fond of melons. The second Sunday of August became National Melon Day. Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985 until his death, by cardiac arrest, in 2006. For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.

So the United States is now a banana republic and, spoiler alert, it led to a corker of a punchline ...

...In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his Presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun is not yet known.

But the pond must make some attempt at reptile offerings for keen herpetology students.

The problem was that a considerable number were obsessed with the doings of an alleged war criminal, so the pond must set the scene ...

Soon enough, the trial will begin and the pond will refrain from commenting, as it does on matters before the court, but in the interim, the pond should note that on the balance of probabilities, Ben Roberts-Smith has already been found guilty of war crimes ... in a case he brought himself.

Also on the balance of probabilities, it seems that the hive mind pack are all in on the right to commit war crimes and get away with it.

The reptiles were wildly indignant at the persecution of the "war hero", with prattling Polonius leading the way ...

The header: War hero Ben Roberts-Smith merits the presumption of innocence;A dramatic arrest, media frenzy and political restraint collide, prompting questions about due process and the presumption of innocence.

The caption for the masked marauders: Ben Roberts-Smith is escorted by AFP officers at Sydney airport following his arrest. Picture: Australian Federal Police

Question. 

Why is Ben Roberts-Smith still being called a war hero by the lizards of Oz, when on the balance of probabilities, according to an Australian court, he committed war crimes, including multiple murders?

Who knows? 

For a while, at least, Ben Roberts-Smith was a name Australian Federal Police commissioner Krissy Barrett dared not speak.
Shortly after 1pm on April 7, Barrett read a statement to the media that began: “A former Australian Defence Force member has today been arrested and will be charged with five counts of war crime – murder after a joint investigation between the Office of the Special Investigator and the AFP.”
Barrett added: “The former soldier was arrested at Sydney’s domestic airport this morning and is expected to face a NSW court later today.” Everyone at the media conference knew the reference was to Roberts-Smith. But the AFP was running a “no names, no pack-drill” line.
Until the lead-up to the evening TV news bulletins, that is. By then, the AFP had released film of Roberts-Smith being escorted off a plane at Sydney airport by AFP members. He had been charged with murder in the presence of his teenage children and partner. Later that day, the AFP did not prevent the media from photographing the accused sitting in a prison van, handcuffed.
It’s not the kind of behaviour that facilitates a fair trial. In The Nightly on April 8, Aaron Patrick wrote: “Mr Roberts-Smith’s lawyers offered in writing to make him available ‘at any place, at any time’ to the authorities, a source close to the former SAS corporal said.”
Obviously, the AFP wanted to put on a show.
Interviewed on Sky News’ The Bolt Report on April 9, former NSW Labor police minister Michael Costa said this was no way to treat a man who had served with distinction and had been awarded a Victoria Cross in the process.
Costa said: “He wasn’t a flight risk; he should have been phoned up and asked to attend the police station for the charging with his lawyer.” He then made a broader point that “this is happening all the time” – referring to the case of Cardinal George Pell – before adding “the list is endless”.

Ah, the Pellist ploy.

And Costa. The pond had hoped to have heard the last of him when he announced I'm leaving a failure.

The pond should note at this point the reptiles didn't offer Polonius any more visual distractions. 

The pond should also point out that when it comes to snaps of the man - who on the balance of probabilities committed war crimes - the reptiles rarely feature him in all his elemental glory ... so the pond will help out.

He might not be guilty of war crimes - let the court decide - but he's certainly guilty of other crimes.

And so to a final beefy chunk of Polonial goodness ...

Then there was the media on the morning after. Roberts-Smith had unsuccessfully sued Nine – that is Network Nine and Nine newspapers such as The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. The entire front page of the SMH on April 8 contained a photo of a darkened, sinister-looking Roberts-Smith, his eyes diverted downwards. It declared in scoffing tone: “From Medals To Murder Charges”. The following six pages were devoted to the accused. As if the Middle East war, oil and fertiliser shortages and the cost of living were of lesser interest to everyday Australians.
It was the same with The Age. Except that the article on the case written by Nine journalist Nick McKenzie had a different heading to that in the SMH. It read: “Many narcissists have tried to twist the legal system; one thing sets this man apart.” McKenzie, an activist journalist who is a long-term Roberts-Smith antagonist, alleged the former soldier had “positioned himself” above the law. How? Well, Roberts-Smith attempted “to use the civil legal system to suppress his conduct in Afghanistan” and this “revealed him as a man who thought the law his servant, a tool to bend to his will”.
No he didn’t. Roberts-Smith took a defamation case against Nine, with respect to claims made about him by Nine’s McKenzie and others, and lost. That’s all. This is not the action of a man “above the law” – whatever that might mean. In his sneering tone the journalist felt the need to refer to the VC winner “as the son of a Supreme Court judge”. What’s that got to do with it?
Having read McKenzie’s lightweight piece in the Nine newspapers, respected Melbourne Law School professor Jeremy Gans posted on X a one-word assessment – “bile”. Yet Nine editors, in their wisdom or lack of same, saw fit to publish such verbal sludge in a prominent place.
The one thing that can be said for truisms is that they are true. It is true that everyone is entitled to a fair trial. And also a presumption of innocence until found guilty, in a criminal trial, to the standard of “beyond reasonable doubt”. Roberts-Smith’s defamation case against Nine was a civil case in the Federal Court of Australia where the standard of proof is “on the balance of probabilities”.
Both Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor responded to the news of the charges laid against Roberts-Smith with professionalism. Both have said that the matter is before the courts.
In her scripted comments, Barrett said: “The overwhelming majority of our ADF do our country proud. Today’s charges are not reflective of the majority members who serve under our Australian flag with honour, distinction and with the values of a democratic nation.” This is capable of being interpreted that a minority – of undisclosed size – do not. This overlooks the fact that of the 30,000 men and women who served in Afghanistan, two have faced charges and none has been convicted of war crimes so far.
Former senior politicians are entitled to discuss the case, as are journalists, provided they are careful with their words.
Writing in The Australian on April 8, Stephen Rice provided an excellent summary of the prosecution’s case. The analysis suggests the case against Roberts-Smith is certainly contestable.
In a statement, former prime minister Tony Abbott made this important point: “If Ben Roberts-Smith transgressed, why wasn’t this picked up prior to his gallantry awards and why wasn’t any culture of brutality towards prisoners detected by his more senior officers, and dealt with quickly, rather than being allowed to fester, as has been alleged, for over a decade?”
While stating that no man or woman is above the reach of the law, John Howard called for the trial to be held “as expeditiously as possible”. The reference is to the truism that justice delayed is justice denied.
As to the AFP’s actions, Roberts-Smith deserves the respect due to all who have been charged with criminal offences. This means not parading the accused under arrest before media outlets.

At this point the pond should pause for a break, because who doesn't love war criminals committing war crimes ...

Refreshed, the pond could turn to the Ughmann...

The header: Australia’s busted bet: the imperative for energy independence; Canberra’s escort of US minesweepers from the Gulf signalled the end of a world order Australia’s economy built upon. Its ‘busted flush’ demands urgent energy and security re-evaluation.

The caption: The USS Canberra (LCS 30) escorts the merchant vessel Seaway Hawk, laden with four decommissioned US Navy Avenger-class minesweepers, through the Arabian Gulf, on January 21, 2026. Picture: Supplied

This might seem like a step away from war crimes, but only by degree, because the Ughmann is big on war and warriors (and the pond thanks him for his seminarian service):

In January, the Pentagon released an image of the USS Canberra escorting a massive cargo ship carrying four ageing US Navy Avenger-class minesweepers out of the Persian Gulf.
The wood and fibreglass vessels were beginning a long journey to a scrapyard in Philadelphia after being retired from service with the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet last year.
American minesweepers have been patrolling the waterways of the Gulf since tankers were targeted during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. But as the Cold War peace dividend was cashed in, de-mining slipped down the Pentagon’s priorities. Mine Warfare Command was dismantled in 2006 and its ageing fleet was left to atrophy in a corner of the US Navy that had no real champion.
The picture of the minesweepers’ departure, just before the shooting started in the third Gulf War, is pregnant with meaning. Most immediately, it reveals Operation Epic Fury as an epic failure of timing, judgment and strategic imagination.
Days after the war began, Iran laid mines in the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted the world’s most vital artery and sent shockwaves through the global economy. The presence of the minesweepers was testimony to the fact the US had understood this risk for 40 years. Donald Trump chose to ignore it.

No need to pause here, except to join the Ughmann in his celebration of kit, The M/V Seaway Hawk transports four decommissioned Avenger-class minesweepers, a visible legacy of a 40-year-old risk that Donald Trump chose to ignore. Picture: Supplied

So there's a sixth reason: the Ughmann is going to go over the same old tired grounds where many reptiles have trodden ...

A New York Times article co-authored by its Australian-born and bred White House reporter, Jonathan Swan, revealed this week that the US President was convinced any war with Iran would be swift and decisive. He was already leaning into that view before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in the White House Situation Room on February 11 to argue that Iran was ripe for regime change and that a joint US-Israeli mission could topple the Islamic Republic.
The next day Trump’s advisers gathered without their Israeli counterparts to caution the President against the notion of a quick and clean victory. CIA director John Ratcliffe is reported to have described the regime change scenarios as farcical. Secretary of State Marco Rubio weighed in, saying, “In other words, it’s bullshit.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine warned that a major campaign against Iran would drastically deplete American weapons stockpiles. He also flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz and the risk that Iran would attempt to block it.
Those who believe Trump enjoys a kind of secular papal infallibility will dismiss this report because of the masthead that printed it. The counter is that Swan has been remarkably good at his craft for a long time and the report rings true because the concerns raised are exactly what anyone paying even modest attention to the region, its history and its geography would have concluded.
Someone also might have added that the enduring feature of American military campaigns since Vietnam has been the difficulty of converting overwhelming tactical superiority into lasting strategic success.
Once Trump would have volunteered this view. One of the reasons so many war-weary Americans were drawn to him was his pledge to end the forever wars. In 2020 he told a group of West Point graduates it was not the job of American forces “to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have not even heard of”.

Oh dear, not a collage ... US President Donald Trump and advisers monitor Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Picture: AFP

And yes, all that was just a prelude to the Ughmann going full isolationist, full prepper, full "get your kit ready for the bug out", full we must industrialise and do everything at home, in short, full survivalist ...

Since last year’s 12-day warm-up in Iran and the assault on Venezuela, it is as if the President had discovered a new key he believed could unlock all doors. It must be intoxicating to have the power to rain destruction on your enemies but, alas, not all have the same motivation. Some don’t do earthly deals. The threat of death does not work on people who believe martyrdom is a glorious gateway to eternal life.
Those of us who love life are left to grapple with how best to deal with navigating the realities of this world. And earthly concerns have been rapidly reordered around the planet.
That is why there is a far deeper meaning buried in the image of ageing American minesweepers being led out of the Persian Gulf by a ship bearing the name of our capital. It speaks to something difficult to capture in words other than epoch defining.
This was a funeral procession for a world order Australia’s leaders assumed would endure. It is a photograph taken at the hinge of history, capturing not just the retirement of a class of ships but the crumbling of an empire of ideas. The old order has been discarded, largely through a wilful act of vandalism by the President of the nation that built and defended it.
Unfortunately, Australia built its modern economy on that order. That bet is now a busted flush. The only certainty from here is that the times will suit us less well. So, we need to deal with the world as it is, not as we hope it might be.
In the shadow of the US security guarantee, we built an island nation that could outsource most of the goods it needs to survive. We grew things, dug things up and sold them for export cash that crashed on to our shores in ever larger waves as commodity prices rose with the spectacular rise of China.
We slowly unlearned how to make things as manufacturing was shipped offshore. In its place we built supply chains that circled the globe and delivered cheap imports. We grew rich and became complacent as inflation fell and the job losses that come with recessions passed out of memory.

What an unhealthy seven minutes of swill, all the more ironic as its coming from a newspaper owned by Americans ...

How did that happen, how did we ship our news offshore? Cargo ships at the Port of Melbourne. Australia built an island nation on global supply chains and outsourced goods, a bet now a 

As with all things Ughmann, it wouldn't be a weekend offering without a goodly, bigly dose of climate science denialism, coal worship and renewables bashing ...

It was in that era that one of the most liquid fuel-dependent countries on Earth mostly stopped producing oil, shut down domestic refining and became addicted to imports. We dismantled our buffers and discarded resilience as inefficiency.
We barely contemplated the idea that the world beyond our shores might not always be open, stable and benign. We organised our economy around a just-in-time delivery in a world where, one day, times were bound to turn. Which is why, when the system failed, the shock was immediate and elemental.
We are now scrounging around the world for shipments of fuel at any price. What matters now is how we respond. We need a short, medium and long-term plan for securing our energy independence. It will not be cheap or easy but the cost of not doing it could not be written more starkly and there are opportunities for a country with Australia’s deep energy endowment.
In tailoring our response, we should watch what the world is doing as it confronts the same crisis.
With a fifth of the world’s oil and gas disrupted by war, a vast hydrocarbon hole has opened in the global economy. Countries are scrambling to fill it. Governments are turning to what they can control. Thermal coal prices have climbed from around $US110 a tonne earlier this year to about $US130 to $US140, as gas disruptions in Asia force utilities to switch fuel.
Coal-fired plants that were meant to close are being kept open. Others are being run harder. Japan is increasing coal-fired generation to conserve gas. South Korea has lifted caps on coal output. India has ordered its coal fleet to run flat out. The Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Thailand are doing the same. Italy has postponed the closure of its coal-fired plants for more than a decade. Germany, once the wind and solar standard bearer and now twice mugged by the real world, is beating a strategic retreat. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that if this crisis endures, Berlin may have to keep coal-fired power plants running longer than planned.
“We have to supply this country with electricity,” Merz said. “I am not prepared to jeopardise the core of our industry just because we have decided on phase-out plans that have become unrealistic.”

This is what happens in the hive mind, the incessant repetition, the inanely similar squawking, the relentless repetition by rote, until all the reptiles are thinking the same thoughts ... and expect their hive mind readership to join in the inane chorus Noshiro Thermal Power Station, Akita Prefecture. Japan is increasing coal-fired generation to conserve gas and ease an energy crunch, a direct consequence of the Middle East war. Picture: AFP

The pond has already been here before with the dog botherer, and how wearisome it is to be here again ...

At a conference in Texas Berlin’s Energy Minister Katherina Reiche said the EU should loosen its “rigid” adherence to climate neutrality and allow itself to miss its 2050 net-zero goal.
Reiche stressed that economic growth must come before green targets.
“At the end of the day, it is good to have a goal of sustainability – but if sustainability crashes your economy, you have to readjust,” Reiche said. “And that’s what we’re doing right now.”
In Europe, the price of carbon has fallen since the war began. The system designed to penalise emissions is under pressure to release more permits and soften its constraints. The price of emitting is being lowered just as the incentive to emit is rising.
Decisions taken under stress tell you a lot. Energy security is a must-have. Cutting carbon is an adornment.

One last snap featuring coal worship ... Labourers sort coal as India’s power plants run flat out to counter Middle East war-induced energy disruptions. Soaring LPG prices are forcing families back to coal, exacerbating health and air quality concerns. Picture: AFP

And one last gobbet of more of the same ...

The markets are sending the same signal. Oil moves with every presidential utterance, but the more important story lies further down the chain. Diesel, petrol and jet fuel are what move trucks, ships, planes and armies, and they are rising faster than crude. With the interruption to the oil supply and the worldwide scramble for fuels those costs will stay high even if the passage through the Strait of Hormuz is cleared.
In bond markets, the cost of money is climbing. Governments are paying more to borrow as energy, inflation and risk are repriced together. They are also preparing to spend more to cushion the shock, pushing long-term borrowing costs higher still. The cost of keeping the system running is rising at the same time as the system itself becomes more uncertain.
Put these signals together and a pattern emerges. When the system is stressed, it behaves as built and the house hydrocarbons built still runs on coal, oil and gas.
That reality should shape Australia’s response. We should use every resource at our disposal to secure our independence in liquid fuels and all other sources of power. We should be truly energy agnostic. Coal, gas, oil, uranium, wind, solar and batteries all have a role to play and we should aim to become an energy superpower.
The Gulf states understood this decades ago. They did not just extract hydrocarbons. They built the industries that flow from them, from plastics to fertilisers, from petrochemicals to pharmaceuticals. They captured value across the entire chain.
Australia could do the same. We could power energy-intensive industries. We could host the data centres that will drive the next wave of artificial intelligence. We could secure our own future while helping to fill the hydrocarbon deficit now emerging in the global system.
That requires a shift in thinking. It requires us to see energy not as a carbon-emitting liability to be managed but as a strategic asset to be developed. The lesson from this crisis is that security is essential and energy security underpins economic and national security. No fuel, no future.
A ship bearing the name Canberra escorting the last minesweepers out of the Gulf is a snapshot of an era when the world was governed by American power and a network of alliances.
That era has passed. Now we endeavour to chart our own future or live in a world where hostile states determine it for us. We are not powerless unless we choose to ignore the power beneath our feet.

And here we are, and what can be done to Gaza can be done to the world ...

And now back to the matter of Ben Roberts-Smith.

Any number of reptiles splashed in this water, but the pond had to send a couple to the intermittent archive, so many there were ... (both intermittent archive links)

The BRS case has been troubling from the start
Poor bugger, Ben Roberts-Smith. The decorated soldier stands no chance.
By Noel Pearson

Anzac’s tragic irony: Diggers face prosecution as their enemies walk free
As Anzac Day approaches, a profound paradox haunts Australia’s war heroes: justice pursued for some, while others walk free.
By Joel Fitzgibbon

A reminder: on the balance of probabilities, Ben Roberts-Smith was found guilty of war crimes, so Noel and Joel are going out of their way to defend the right to commit war crimes ...

It's easy to see why the pond decided to cut Noel and Joel short.

The pond has never been big on war crimes or war criminals, or their talk ...

Reluctantly the pond must concede that the hive mind is not entirely monolithic.

This came via the venerable Beade in the Weekly Beast last Friday: Andrew Bolt swims against News Corp tide on Ben Roberts-Smith prosecution:

Occasionally the Murdoch commentator Andrew Bolt defies the party line. In 2021 he said News Corp Australia’s editorial campaign for net zero emissions by 2050 was “rubbish” and “global warming propaganda”.
This week Bolt stuck his neck out in support of the war crimes prosecution of Ben Roberts-Smith, in a marked departure from News Corp’s approach since 2018, when the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald published a series of stories alleging the Victoria Cross recipient had committed murder and other war crimes.
“I have a simple question for the people angrily defending Ben Roberts-Smith, claiming a war hero is being persecuted by woke civilians judging soldiers in battle from the comfort of their sofas,” Bolt wrote in his Herald Sun column. “Do you think Australian soldiers should be allowed to shoot unarmed prisoners?”
Reporters Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters have had to contend with multiple attacks on their journalism in News Corp pages.
In 2018 Roberts-Smith hired a PR firm and the investigative reporter Ross Coulthart as a consultant, and the Weekend Australian gave him a favourable sit-down interview, accompanied by photos of Roberts-Smith with his then wife Emma.
The former soldier claimed in a front-page story run by the national broadsheet that the stories were “demonstrably false’’.
“Nine has accused me of murder,” he said. “Frankly, it is time for their journalists to put up their evidence or admit they have none.”
As recently as May last year McKenzie was subjected to accusations on Sky News Australia that he had been “caught on secret tapes” acting unethically. Roberts-Smith’s application to reopen the appeal over the recording was rejected.
In his 2023 book Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes, Masters wrote: “I do not buy The Australian. It makes me sick.”

The lizard Oz makes the pond sick, but the pond doesn't buy it. Instead the pond confesses to a morbid fascination, a deep masochism, a wilful sickness.

After Joel's and Noel's attempts at FUD then comes a remarkable challenge. Could Our Henry sound more depraved than the Bolter?

Oh there's much more humbug on offer, much more of a word salad of pompous ancient references, but line him up and you could find him in the Nuremberg trials on the wrong side.

The pond discovered this because the reptiles offered a weekend special bonus Our Henry, with the hole in bucket repair man all in on war crimes and war criminals ... understandable enough when you remember that war criminal Benji is one of his heroes:

The header: Both great and terrible things happen in combat — that’s the hard truth; The laws we expect our soldiers to obey are increasingly at odds with the grim realities of modern armed conflict.

The reptiles left out any credit for that triptych and once again they muffed the chance to feature a different view, though they had these snaps in their archive ...

By golly, there are war crimes and then there are dress code violations...

On with Our Henry, and this day is rolled gold Henry, a reversion to the good old days. (Rolled gold might just be a thin coating, but who thought Our Henry was deep?)

Yes, it's peak Henry, it's fully certified Thucydides ...

War, said Thucydides, is the cruellest teacher – and what it teaches is cruelty. A former Athenian general, Thucydides was a hard man, neck-deep in the human condition as it is, rather than as it could be.
To know life, he wrote, is to know that war is not just ineradicable but at times necessary – for other than the credible threat of violence, little can deter the bad from crushing the good.
And victory, he cautioned, goes only to those who are immune to “expensive hope” – mankind’s habit of “carelessly longing for what it desires, using sovereign reason to thrust aside what it does not fancy”. Prudent without being timorous, they are the few who combine an acute awareness of danger with the capacity for resolute action, instinctively performing deeds of valour when others would be frozen by doubt.
Thucydides’ reflections – shaped by both a clear-eyed sympathy for war’s victims and a genuine admiration for those who put their lives at risk on their fellow citizens’ behalf – are worth recalling as Australians consider the charges against Ben Roberts-Smith. They bring into view dilemmas as old as organised violence itself.
Some points are clear. To kill prisoners in cold blood is completely indefensible: the refusal to do so is one of the marks by which civilisation distinguishes itself from barbarism. But clarity at that margin does not resolve the harder question: how norms are to be sustained when confronting adversaries who reject them altogether.
The rules of war and a collapse into savagery
The idea that those adversaries should benefit from the protections the norms afford is a very recent one. The Greeks, for example, developed elaborate rules of war that were intended to ensure the clash of arms remained governed by reason rather than naked fury. Yet they never supposed that the restraints on the conduct of battle bound all alike.
It is therefore unsurprising that when Plato suggested, in The Laws, that Athens should apply the same constraints to wars with barbarians that applied to those with Greeks, his proposal was ridiculed as utterly naive.

There's an incredible amount of humbug at play here. After all US submariners cheerfully left Iranian sailors to die, with the full throated support of war criminal Pete Kegsbreath, and no reptile has said boo to that barbaric goose.

And by reverting to ancient times, Our Henry manages to skirt around the Nuremberg trials and the Geneva Conventions that arose from the second world war, and which were designed to stop the appalling behaviour of war criminals committing war crimes.

But apologists will always find a way to skirt the rules and find their heroes ...

Then-SAS Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith on a tour of duty in Afghanistan with the Australian Special Operations Task Group in 2010. Roberts-Smith was awarded a Victoria Cross for saving the lives of wounded comrades in battle.

The pond is quite ready to believe that Roberts-Smith will get off, on the basis of the many attempts to influence the court in his behaviour even before the trial begins, and on the basis of the many filthy rich and influential people backing his cause. and not least because the likes of Our Henry are keen to discover a keen philosophical basis for war criminality ... but no matter what, on the balance of probabilities, a court has already found him guilty of war crimes ...

Nor, centuries later, did the rules of chivalry extend to those who had not sworn to uphold them. In practice, their protections were confined to the knightly class – those able, if wronged, to invoke enforcement by a Christian prince. And there is little evidence that chivalry’s rules were observed in the Crusades – no more by the Crusaders than by their Muslim adversaries.
The collapse, in the late 16th century, of the norms of chivalry – and the descent of warfare into savagery during the Wars of Religion – prompted a reformulation of the laws of war by Enlightenment jurists. Like their predecessors, however, they did not contend that the restraints they formulated could or should bear on conflicts with adversaries who rejected them altogether.
Thus, German philosopher Christian Wolff, who introduced the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in his 1749 treatise on the Law of Nations, emphasised that the distinction could be sustained only if the combatants on each side clearly demarcated themselves from their civilian counterparts; adversaries who didn’t were no better than pirates and deserved to be erased from the face of the Earth.
Retired Special Forces Major Heston Russell discusses the recent arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith and calls out the media for the “dramatic" way in which he was detained.
So too Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel, whose Law of Nations (1758) is often treated as a foundation of modern international law. Of those guilty of “enormous breaches of the law of nations” – such as hiding behind civilians – he wrote: “Enemies of the human race, who injure all nations by trampling underfoot the foundations of humanity’s common safety, they must be refused any quarter.”
The St Petersburg Declaration
When international lawyers began to translate the evolving norms into binding instruments – starting with the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868 – it was widely assumed, if not always stated, that they applied only within the “family of nations”: the states whose “government is sufficiently stable to undertake binding commitments under international law”, including as to the conduct of war.
But the catastrophes of the two world wars brought an immense expansion and a universalisation of the restraints the laws of war imposed. Driven in part by humanitarian impulse, in part by revulsion at the scale of the slaughter, and in part by the utopian belief that rationally constructed rules – enforced through international institutions – could tame the furies of war, increasingly stringent obligations were imposed on the deployment of armed force.

It goes without saying that Our Henry is inclined to the furies of war, and almost goes full Taliban ... Taliban fighters stand guard near the Torkham border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Nangarhar province.

But then Our Henry is devoted to Benji, as big a war criminal as can be found, up there with the mad Mullahs, so the hole in bucket man knows he must make sure to dehumanise any victims of unlawful violence ...

And it was, for the first time, unambiguously asserted that the obligations were binding in all conflicts, even against adversaries who blatantly ignored them.
Reality, however, has borne no relationship to the soaring aspirations that inspired those changes. States that take the rules seriously have rarely, if ever, fought one another. Instead, their soldiers have confronted enemies prepared to use any means available in their quest for victory – including by exploiting the protections the laws of war afford. In the fog of battle, where decisions are made in an instant and often at the edge of survival, the apparent clarity of intricate rules has repeatedly proven to be illusory.
Assuming the worst of our soldiers
To make things worse, terrorists and their supporters have increasingly levelled claims of violations without any credible evidence, propagating them so as to demonise their opponents, drive them into undue caution and secure a decisive operational advantage – the reckless allegations by Hamas’s supporters against Israel being merely the latest case in point.

Just to add to the emotional balance, the reptiles threw in a snap designed to stir the hive mind ... Palestinian militants drive back to the Gaza Strip with the body of Shani Louk, a German-Israeli dual citizen, after kidnapping her from Israel’s Nova music festival on October 7, 2023.

And so to a final exhortation to allow the right to commit war crimes to continue unhindered, at least if you're supposed to be a goodie:

The result has been to politicise the processes by which those claims are debated, undermining objectivity in their assessment and inducing a rush to judgment – not least about Roberts-Smith.
On one side, “progressives”, deeply hostile to the culture and ethos of the military – especially its elite units – are quick to assume the worst of our soldiers. On the other, conservatives, appalled by what they see as a collapse of loyalty and the refusal to acknowledge the burdens borne by those who fight on Australia’s behalf, are equally quick to insist that whatever our troops have done must be defended.
That polarisation has been exacerbated by the shabby treatment of the units concerned – including investigatory delays that are, in themselves, absolutely inexcusable – deepening the anger conservatives feel at the sanctimony of their opponents.
Whatever the causes of those delays, it is now reasonable to wonder whether Roberts-Smith can, after so many years and with Afghanistan firmly in the Taliban’s grip, receive a fair trial. Nonetheless, a trial there will be; and it will need to be judged on its merits, as will Roberts-Smith, taking account of the circumstances in which the alleged events occurred and the overwhelming pressures those circumstances create.
The Greeks placed their rules of war under the patronage of Athena, the goddess not of fury but of discipline. They knew, however, that the god Ares, a “bloodthirsty marauder” (as Homer called him) who haunted the field of battle, could seize the mind of even the finest warriors – as he did in propelling Achilles’ murderous instincts, Ajax’s rage and the savage outbursts of Ulysses.
That both great things and terrible things are done in combat is a fact as old as mankind. Even so, the focus there will quite properly be on this trial should not blind us to the larger truth: that the laws we expect our soldiers to obey are increasingly at odds with the grim realities of armed conflict.
Thucydides described the suffering war inflicts as “meizo e kata dacrya”: too great to be measured by tears. And as its horrors stripped away the veneer of civilised morality, even the gods were driven to weep. While retaining and preserving our values, we should ensure we do not impose more suffering on our fighting men and women than realism, reason and prudence demand.

And there you have it. 

A double Thucydides bunger, with Our Henry fully down with the grim realities of armed conflict.

Murder an unarmed civilian, take off his prosthetic leg and drink from it, perhaps toasting Our Henry for his splendid philosophical insights?

Sure thing ... it's the dinkum Our Henry way ...

Altar wine lifts fragile Xian spirits, and every Xian loves a good teleportation story ... it also shows the spirits at work ...

Finally the pond has problems with Wolff, but not as many as Melania has ...