Another day, another set of jihadists, and only former Chairman Rudd as the distraction ...

Lordy, lordy, did they need the help of a writer or a hundred or so, or what...

...We recognise and deeply regret the distress this decision has caused to our audience, artists and writers, donors, corporate partners, the government and our own staff and people. We also apologise to Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah for how the decision was represented and reiterate this is not about identity or dissent but rather a continuing rapid shift in the national discourse around the breadth of freedom of expression in our nation following Australia’s worst terror attack in history.
We acknowledge and are committed to rebuilding trust with our artistic community and audience to enable open and respectful discussions at future Adelaide Writers' Week events.
The focus is now on ensuring a successful Adelaide Festival proceeds in a way which safeguards the long and rich cultural legacy of our state but also protects the hardworking staff delivering this important event.

A word salad. 

A mealy mouthed jumble of meaningless words...and an abject failure as an apology ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles continued their jihad, this time with Adler in their sights ... and when it's Jew on Jew it can get ugly really quickly ... 

‘Three minutes away from a new Kristallnacht’: how Louise Adler joked about threat to Jews
The former Adelaide Writers Week director mocked Australians concerned about antisemitism telling an audience they ‘might actually believe that we are three minutes away from a new Kristallnacht’.
by Ariela Bard

The pond's not brave enough to go there.

Beginning with a reference to a Woody Allen movie suggests that Bard needs to get out and about a bit, and perhaps take in a catch-up viewing of Manhattan. If Woody is her cultural guide, can Epstein be far behind?

Meanwhile Tim had the singular distinction of framing it as Cancel Culture business ...

Cancel culture runs riot
Writers Week axed – could Adelaide Festival be next?
The event has been cancelled and the entire board has been replaced following a boycott by 180 authors over censorship claims that could reshape Australia’s literary landscape.
By Tim Douglas

Who is cancelling whom? Is Whom on first? Is What on second?

If it's any consolation to those cancelling flights, Adelaide is a dull town for a junket.

Meanwhile, the reptiles had an EXCLUSIVE top of the page early in the morning ...

EXCLUSIVE
Long arm of the hate speech law to also target Islamophobia
Labor’s most senior Muslim MP – cabinet minister Anne Aly – has declared the government is open to criminalising hatreds like Islamophobia and homophobia after the antisemitism bill is passed.
By Sarah Ison

Oh that must be bad news for the lizard Oz jihadists. 

Notoriously the Bolter couldn't even handle 18C.

After the verdict, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott warned against restricting "the sacred principle of free speech".
"Free speech means the right of people to say what you don't like, not just the right of people to say what you do like," he said.

Not in Adelaide, onion muncher!

Such talk surely requires a return to the jihad with even more fervour, with any attempt to sanction Islamophobia and homophobia a dire threat to the business model.

Never mind, the lizard Oz will always have transphobia and climate science.

Brave Rupert led the counter charge against any change to gun laws ...

Extremism should be the real target of reforms, not gun laws
Responsible firearms owners will welcome legislative changes that genuinely enhance public safety, but those changes must be well considered.
By Rupert Hoskin

The pond didn't note a member of the lizard Oz hive mind scribbling an enthusiastic column in support of the proposed gun laws, but the pond frequently dwells in the land of the delusional.

Meanwhile King Donald keeps threatening to do to Iran what he's doing to Minnesota and Venezuela ...

Put it another way ...

Put it another way ...

Thousands Slaughtered
‘Help is on the way’: Trump urges Iranians to overthrow institutions
The US President has cancelled all meetings with Iranian officials and is said to be leaning toward military action as the regime displays long-range receivers, modems and phones protesters use to communicate amid plans to crush them within 24 hours.
By Richard Ferguson and Lydia Lynch

How soon before King Donald boasts about being the new Shah of Iran? And did all that idle chatter about the Epstein files disappear, or what?

The pond supposes it should quote a couple of reptiles to keep herpetology studies alive, and a couple of reptiles brooded about former Chairman Rudd ... with the issue always who best to appoint to the court of mad King Donald, who in some narcissistic moment is always likely to let loose a volley of demented spleen (as approved of and endorsed by the Murdochians at Faux Noise):

The header: Anthony Albanese could have asked Kevin Rudd to stay on … but decided not to;No amount of gushing over Rudd’s achievements can disguise the fact that the government made a conscious choice that it was time for a new Australian envoy in Washington to deal with Donald Trump.

The caption for the bearded smirker: Kevin Rudd leaves the White House after a meeting between Anthony Albanese and Donald Trump. Picture: AAP

The trouble, of course, is that if you call the king barking mad, true though it might be, truth is no defence when up against a demented narcissist who can only be consoled by sightings of gilt of a golden kind ...

Like his “nothing to see here” backdown on a Bondi royal commission, Anthony Albanese insists Kevin Rudd wasn’t pushed from his job as Australia’s Ambassador to the United States a year before his term was due to expire.
“It was entirely Kevin Rudd’s decision”, the PM said, arguing there was “absolutely not” any suggestion from the Trump administration that he should be moved on.
But if Albanese wanted Rudd to stay, he could have asked him to – as a service to the nation – and Rudd would have had little choice but to agree.
No amount of gushing over Rudd’s achievements in the role can disguise the fact that the government made a conscious and strategic choice that it was time for a new Australian envoy in Washington.
There is no doubt Rudd has done a good job, helping Australia to avoid the sort of treatment Donald Trump has meted out to many US allies.
He has formed good working relationships across the Congress and with key members of the Trump administration, but unlike past Australian ambassadors such as Joe Hockey, was unable to break into the White House’s inner circle.
Rudd’s tenure in Washington was dogged by his past negative statements about Trump, who he branded as a “village idiot” and “the most destructive president in history”.
He belatedly scrubbed the criticism from his social media accounts, but only after Trump was re-elected in November 2024.
This all came to a head last year during the PM’s first in-person meeting with Trump, when there was a lighthearted but menacing exchange about Rudd’s historic commentary.
“I don’t like you, and I probably never will,” Trump said at the time.
The government tried to laugh off the comments, and points to the fact that many Trump confidants, including JD Vance and Marco Rubio, said terrible things about him in the past.

Here the pond must interrupt for a meditation. 

Those imagining the death of King Donald might help should think about the immediate alternative.

J.D. Vance was recently described by one leading US Catholic newspaper as a "moral stain" and not just for that nasty affair with the couch.

And then there's liddle Marco, clearly positioning himself for a go at being king himself - the old mad king will surely be dead at some time, and then it's on with a new king.

The New Yorker had a detailed portrait of his moral degeneracy ...  

How Marco Rubio Went from “Little Marco” to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler
As Secretary of State, the President’s onetime foe now offers him lavish displays of public praise—and will execute his agenda in Venezuela and around the globe. By Dexter Filkins (that's an intermittent archive link)

Just one gobbet will suffice to give the flavour ...

...Since Trump began his second term, his “America First” foreign policy has brought about an epochal change in the country’s place in the world, as the U.S. casts off traditional commitments to pursue its immediate self-interest. The sprawling network of alliances, treaties, and foreign-assistance programs that the U.S. built at the end of the Second World War is being radically altered or simply discarded. Since January, the U.S. has cut tens of billions of dollars in humanitarian and development aid, withdrawn from such landmark agreements as the Paris climate accord, and curtailed reporting on human-rights abuses. Entire government departments have been hollowed out. In their place is a highly personalized approach, largely dependent on the whims of Trump, whose foreign policy reflects a harsher, stingier, and less forgiving country.
Rubio, at fifty-four, is the policy’s unlikely executor. Before joining the Trump Administration, he spent his career advocating for America as the leader of the world’s democracies; the son of Cuban immigrants, he was a champion of aid to impoverished countries. Some observers believe that Rubio is working to provide consistency and balance in a tumultuous Administration. “He’s doing his best to moderate Trump’s worst impulses,” a European foreign minister told me. “He understands the stakes. He’s whispering in Trump’s ear. But he has only so much influence.” Others are less charitable. They believe that Rubio is presiding over the remaking of America as a kind of rogue nation, just as an axis of authoritarian rivals, led by China, rises to challenge the world’s democracies. “Trashing our allies, gutting State and foreign aid, the tariffs—the damage is going to take years to repair, if it can ever be repaired,” Eric Rubin, a retired ambassador who headed the State Department’s diplomatic union, told me. “I hope it ruins his career.”
By most standards, Rubio occupies a privileged post: his desk in the White House is just a few steps from the Oval Office. But it is not the position that he hoped to occupy. In 2016, Rubio ran for President and lost to Trump in the primary. He now serves his former opponent—an unstable leader who regularly traduces institutions that Rubio spent his career supporting. “Ultimately, he has to be a hundred per cent loyal to the President, and when the President zigs and zags Rubio has to zig and zag, too,” a former Western diplomat told me. “He’s had to swallow a lot of sh*t.”(*google bot approved)

Speaking of swallowing sh*t, the pond apologises for doing that Tootle and rejoins Ben, still packing it as he explains that a singular ability to wallow in crap is a key to the role:

“I think that one of the things about President Trump is that he looks forward on these issues,” Albanese said on Tuesday.
But people like Vance and Rubio kissed the presidential ring, becoming obsequious members of the cult of Trump. That was never an option for Rudd.
The White House’s statement on Rudd’s upcoming departure suggests he won’t be missed.
“Ambassador Rudd worked well with President Trump and the administration. We wish him well,” a spokesman told The Australian.

Immediately there came a visual interruption: Rudd, second from right, attends a meeting in the White House between Anthony Albanese and Donald Trump in October 2025. Picture: Getty Images

Ben kept on with his musings:

It’s unusual that Rudd would want to return to the same job that he was doing before he was tapped for the ambassadorial role, as president of the Asia Society. In true Rudd style, he will take on additional responsibility as head of the society’s Centre for China Analysis.
He has deep expertise on China and wrote his doctoral thesis on Xi Jinping’s world view, so will be in hot demand on the speaking circuit as Washington looks to reset its relationship with Beijing.
If he still has ambitions to become United Nations’ secretary-general, as he did a decade ago, the Asia Society gig would give him the necessary launch-pad.
The process to replace incumbent secretary-general Antonio Guterres, whose term expires in January 2027, will be a complex one, and some nations believe it is time for a woman to take the role.
But Rudd, as a former prime minister, foreign minister and ambassador to the US, could be in with a shot should he decide to campaign for the post.
Unlike in 2016, when Malcolm Turnbull refused to back him for the role, he could be assured of the Albanese government’s support.
Rudd’s four year term as ambassador was due to end in March 2027 but he will leave the post in March next year.
His decision to quit early shocked even senior members of the government, who are now speculating over his possible replacement.
The two leading contenders are former Labor ministers Joel Fitzgibbon and Stephen Conroy. Government insiders said both had the right temperament and experience to deal with the Trump administration.
Unlike Dr Rudd, both are golfers, which could be useful, given Hockey formed a personal relationship with President Trump on the fairway.
Mr Fitzgibbon, a former defence minister and Labor right-winger, is believed to have no record of past negative comments about the US President.

The next caption startled the pond.

Did the reptiles just produce a "crud" joke?

They did, they did: KRudd’s exit as Australia’s ambassador highlights the political and personal challenges of diplomacy in a second Trump presidency.

The sorting of applicants for the sh*t swallowing job continued:

But Mr Conroy, a former communications minister and right wing faction boss, last year described the president as “moronically stupid” in a television interview. This might disqualify him for the role, given the difficulties Rudd faced.
There has also been speculation Trade Minister and Labor elder Don Farrell could be in the frame, but he all but ruled himself out, saying he liked his current job and there was “still plenty of work to do”.
Unfortunately, Albanese doesn’t have great form in selecting political appointees for plum diplomatic posts.
He appointed Rudd to the critical diplomatic post in December 2022, knowing of his past criticism of Trump, who weeks earlier had announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination.
His decision to appoint former Labor minister Stephen Smith as high commissioner to the UK also proved to be a misstep, with Smith alienating influential Australians in London with his dislike of the social aspects of the job.
Outside of the Labor club, there has been speculation Scott Morrison might be a good pick for the role, given his strong ties to the Trump administration. He’s unlikely to get the nod because Albanese doesn’t like or trust him.
If the government opts for a non-political appointment, recently-returned ambassador to Japan, Justin Hayhurst, would likely be at the top of its list.
Defence Department secretary Greg Moriarty is also considered a contender should the government need another Dennis Richardson – the veteran bureaucrat who served in the post from 2005-2009.
The decision as to who replaces Rudd will be one of Albanese’s most important foreign affairs decisions of this term of government. Even if he chooses well, there’s a lot that can go wrong.

There's a lot could go wrong? 

Thanks to mad King Donald there's a lot already gone wrong, and the main mission will be to stop him declaring himself Albo's replacement, as well as the GG and the new King of England ...

While at The New Yorker, make sure to drop in on ...

Letter from Copenhagen
Denmark Is Sick of Being Bullied by Trump (that's an intermittent archive link)
The U.S., once Denmark’s closest ally, is threatening to steal Greenland and attacking the country’s wind-power industry. Is this a permanent breakup? by Margaret Talbot

If dealing with the madness of King Donald is a problem for Oz, just think of the poor Danes ...

...Trump’s antagonism toward Greenland has also changed Danish views about European unity. In the past, Danes had been soft Euroskeptics. They joined the E.U. in the nineteen-seventies, but they kept their own currency, the krone, and in 1992 they voted against the Maastricht Treaty, which tightened European conformity regarding security, citizenship, and other matters. When Frederiksen recently called for more defense spending, she acknowledged, “European coöperation has never really been a favorite of many Danes.” They’d grumbled, she said, about everything from “crooked cucumbers and banning plastic straws” to open immigration policies, which Frederiksen’s government had rejected.
Ole Wæver, a professor of international relations at the University of Copenhagen, told me that Danes have long had a “kind of anti-E.U. sentiment, with a lot of the same arguments that you saw in Brexit—‘Oh, it’s big bureaucracy,’ ‘Brussels is far away,’ ‘It’s taking away our democracy.’ ” Such attitudes, Wæver said, had helped to make Denmark “go overboard” in its allegiance to America. Elisabet Svane, a columnist for Politiken, told me, “Our Prime Minister used to say, ‘You cannot put a piece of paper between me and the U.S., I’m so transatlantic.’ She’s still transatlantic, but I think you can put a little book in between now.”

And so on, with those Scandinavians in the thick of it ...

But, billy goat, the reptiles hadn't finished with former Chairman Rudd, because the lesser member of the Kelly gang was also on the case, albeit Joe only offered a mere two minute read...

It's not the bromancer, it's just the best the pond can do ...

The header: The timing of Kevin Rudd’s resignation can mean only one thing; The soon to be ex-US envoy will now be able to speak out loudly, clearly and publicly to pass judgment on Donald Trump’s remaking of the global order.

The caption for the dull snap: Anthony Albanese with Australian ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd, who will leave his post in March. Picture: AAP

Amazingly being in the presence of a mad king is, according to Joe, the most coveted diplomatic position available, though the pond had thought it was second to an appointment to Satan's court in Hades ...

The biggest surprise about Kevin Rudd’s decision to step down as Australian ambassador in Washington is the timing, especially given the momentous changes being made to the world order because of decisions being taken by Donald Trump.
The former Labor prime minister is departing his post – the most coveted diplomatic position available – a full 12 months before his term was due to end, with a more emboldened Trump fully capable of rerouting the course of world history in that period.

Getting the hell out of town now is a surprise?

Some might suspect Joe's outing was simply a way to fling in an AV distraction, complete with one of those awkward reptile framings that are perhaps AI induced:

Kevin Rudd will step down as Australia’s ambassador to the United States within weeks, with a replacement to be announced. His departure comes at a key moment for Australia–US ties, including AUKUS and election‑year dynamics in Washington.

Joe slobbered at the prospect of the former Chairman providing yet more entertainment:

Rudd will now forgo his front-row seat to history as an official representative of the Australian government in Washington and instead take up the role of global president of the Asia Society, the think tank he headed between 2021 and 2023.
He will also serve as the head of the society’s Centre for China Analysis.
This comes as a major shock. Questions about Rudd’s motivation and how the decision was reached will reverberate for months to come.
Yet, in the end, it can only mean one thing – Rudd’s return to the Asia Society means he will now be able to speak out loudly, clearly and publicly to pass judgment on Trump’s remaking of the global order.
This is especially true as it relates to how Trump manages the pre-eminent challenge of the time – Washington’s relationship with China.
This is a subject on which Rudd is regarded as a leading global expert, and in late 2024 he released his latest book on Xi Jinping’s political philosophy.
Rudd has been forced to hold his tongue for the past three years, unable to defend himself publicly amid political attacks on his performance or even to issue his verdict on the key foreign policy decisions of the Trump 2.0 era.

The reptiles interrupted with a bigly snap of the King and a cute insert, Donald Trump famously told Kevin Rudd ‘I’ll never like you’.

After King Donald elevating KRudd up the pantheon of those with a disdain for narcissistic sociopathy, it was on to the wrap:

Once he finishes as ambassador in Washington at the end of March, the Australian public should expect to hear more from Rudd, including his considered yet candid thoughts about the outlook and stands taken by the Trump administration.
Remember, it was during his leadership role at the Asia Society that Rudd labelled Trump as “the most destructive president in history” and a “traitor to the West” – the comments that created so much difficulty for him once he took up his diplomatic posting in Washington.
Rudd will now end his term as ambassador to the US just as Trump is due to visit Beijing in April 2026 in perhaps the most important international trip of his presidency – a crucial moment for the world.
Any sober assessment of Rudd’s performance as Australian ambassador to the US should recognise that he took up the posting at a challenging time in which Trump posed new difficulties for the US/Australia alliance relationship.
His administration imposed tariffs on Australia, strongly criticised Australia’s inadequate levels of defence spending and conducted itself in ways that generated uncertainty over the US’s character and reliability as an ally.
Yet, the results showed that Rudd proved effective in keeping the alliance strong and on an even keel.
He was successful in securing the political endorsement of Trump for AUKUS, marshalling support in the US congress for the landmark security agreement and clinching a new $13.8bn critical minerals framework agreement with Washington.
Former Australian ambassador to Washington Dennis Richardson said he believed Rudd had been “outstanding” in the role but that it was a “shame he is going after three years”.
“His achievements in the time he’s been there have been very, very significant indeed,” Richardson said.
“So, his time as ambassador shouldn’t be measured in terms of duration. It should be measured in terms of achievement.”

AUKUS was a success? 

That should age well ...

Finally, in view of the lizard Oz's ongoing jihad, how about a bit of counter-programming?

Israel Is Still Demolishing Gaza, Building by Building, More than 2,500 structures have been destroyed since the start of the cease-fire, an analysis by The New York Times has found. (*archive link)

In short:

One former Israeli military official questioned the scope of the demolition.
“This is absolute destruction,” said Shaul Arieli, who commanded forces in Gaza in the 1990s. “It’s not selective destruction, it’s everything.”

Talk about how to put the old, dismal Kristallnacht in the shade with a brand new, epic Kristallnacht .

Oh hush now, no reason to get Ariela Bard agitated.

Who'd dare mention an Israeli government pogrom, a hearty bout of ethnic cleansing and ghetto obliteration in her presence?

You won't find any of those stories being run by the lizard Oz jihadists ...

And so to wrap up proceedings with the immortal Rowe, returned to save the pond's sanity ...(and just where is the infallible Pope?)

By golly what an astute selection of reading matter. Is he on course to be even worse than our Minns?The pond thought we had a lock on it, but he's studying hard ...

In which the pond sends the entire reptile offering off to the intermittent archive, and has to turn to current 'ein Sturms in reptile Wasserglas' to fix the Wasserglas gap... ...

 

The pond regrets that - almost immediately after his return, the bromancer - as many predicted and expected - joined in the current hive mind jihad.

The pond was left with no choice but to send him off to the intermittent archive ...

Anti-Semitism thrives in mainstream progressive politics, some Islamic cultures
The Albanese government will almost certainly fail in its effort to defeat anti-Semitism because it still doesn’t understand the problem.
By Greg Sheridan
Foreign Editor

Those who want to have at him can, the pond is content to note that anti-Semitism thrives in right wing la land, but never expects the reptiles to notice.

The pond is sad, but that's the way the cookie and the current jihad crumble.

Joining him in the intermittent archive was the careening Caterist ...

‘Social cohesion’ an invitation to moral equivalence
More migrants people snub Team Australia
Sloppy talk of ‘social cohesion’ risks blurring a royal commission’s task as anti-Semitism surges. Findings by the Scanlon Foundation show some migrants and the young drifting away from ‘Team Australia’.
By Nick Cater

Columnist

Enough already about migrant people from a migrant people...and as for blather by a former Pom about Team Australia, enough already.

Joining the pair in the pond's specially constructed jihad sin bin was Ben, packing it in his usual way ...

Hate preachers, groups with terror links put on notice … at last
At last, hate preachers and Hizb ut-Tahrir face bans
The government is finally acting to ban hate groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and silence radical preachers. The proposed laws will have teeth, too.
By Ben Packham
Foreign affairs and defence correspondent

Devotees of the jihad will be amused by the headline leading off the digital "news" this day ...

Preach hate, go to prison
PM’s hate speech, gun reforms spark Coalition alarm
A carve out in new hate speech laws has raised alarm from Coalition sources that anti-Semitic views could still be espoused as long as a religious text is invoked, such as a passage in the Koran calling Jews and other nonbelievers ‘the worst of creatures’.
By Sarah Ison and Elizabeth Pike

Coalition alarm?

Oh they like to talk the jihad talk, but when it comes to doing the jihad gun ban walk, they tremble in the face of the gun lobby, not up there with the IRA, but still, close to the jihadists' hearts...

The pond also dismissed out of hand the standard reptile EXCLUSIVE beat up ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘Confusing mess’: Expert slams Bondi massacre ­inquiry set-up
The Albanese government has been warned the Richardson Bondi inquiry structure could see officials told what evidence they can give, potentially undermining the probe into intelligence failures.
By Ben Packham and James Dowling

This carry-on is going to last the entire length of the RC. 

That's the real reason they wanted the RC, reams of headlines and endless ravaging of Albo for a year or more ...so there's no point in encouraging the raskals at the get go, just as there's no doubting it will wound him ...

The pond also isn't interested in defending the mad Mullahs ... with the fight being led by Boyes of The Times, amazingly, given his age, at one with Gen Z..

Gen Z leads fight against Iran’s old men
Iran faces its gravest threat since 2009 as young ‘enemies of God’ spread unrest to 160 locations nationwide, challenging the regime’s control with economic grievances and social media tactics.
By Roger Boyes

To make the massacre complete, the pond also despatched ...

Tragically, the Islamist regime could ‘limp’ along
What remains for Tehran? The answer is extreme violence, now directed against its own people. Will it work? Comparison to similar revolutionary situations elsewhere suggests that it might.
By Jonathan Spyer

Discovering why the reptiles decided to give the word 'limp' scare quotes wasn't worth the effort of the read, especially as the author saw no reason to use scare quotes in his final sentence ...

A combination of both short- and long-term intervention and assistance would be the most judicious path. Absent this, the Islamic regime in Iran could limp on for a while, to the extreme detriment of Iran’s people and the wider Middle East region.

Were the reptiles being politically correct, worried that they might offend anyone with a limp? Unlikely ...but the pond will leave Spyer and Boyes to fight out the fate of Iran, as only columnists staring at keyboards and screen can do ...

Good luck to the people of Iran, they haven't had much since the CIA helped set the 'revolution' rolling.

The pond did dive below the fold but the only addition in the top six was on the same theme...

Deadly silence: regime-imposed blackouts concealing brutality demand universal legal response
History suggests that an unbridled theocratic regime – institutionalised through state-sponsored terrorism – endangers not only the Iranian people but regional and global security.
By Saba Vasefi

Speaking of unbridled theocratic regimes, will the reptiles ever get around to discussing the current state of Israel? Or the white Xian nationalists in charge of US policy.

Not likely.

The hive mind is extremely monochrome these days and the pond apologises to those who try to explore the archive in one of its drop out moments ...

Moving along, what to do ?How to manage a little Tuesday filler?

Mad King Donald is always a tempting target, as the madness grows wilder by the day ...

Instead the pond decided to borrow from Jeff Sparrow, scribbling in Crikey yesterday ...

The Australian defended Bill Leak to the death. So why is it coming for Cathy Wilcox’s Bondi cartoon?
The Australian has run at least 10 stories decrying Cathy Wilcox’s controversial cartoon about the Bondi royal commission. The hypocrisy is staggering. (sorry, that's a paywall link)

On Sunday, The Sydney Morning Herald apologised for publishing a cartoon by Cathy Wilcox that depicted the campaign for a royal commission into the Bondi massacre as astroturfed by supporters of Israel. Today, The Australian runs an anti-Wilcox piece by Catherine West, the immediate past chair of Nine. By my count, this brings the number of articles the Oz has so far run about Wilcox’s cartoon to 10.
To be fair, the Murdoch paper possesses a certain expertise on offensive cartoons, given how regularly it lauded the late Bill Leak — as much because of his egregious bigotry as despite it. Older readers will remember how, on National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children’s Day in 2016, Leak offered an image of a swarthy, VB-clutching Indigenous man too drunk to remember the name of his son.
One can scarcely imagine how the Oz might respond if the SMH published an equivalent image directed at Jews. In the context, a cartoon relying on racialised physical characteristics for a punchline based on an offensive stereotype would look like something from Der Stürmer. Yet, when the Leak drawing led to an investigation under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (remember that?), The Australian launched a full-throated campaign to not only defend Leak but also laud him as a fearless truthteller.
Within a few months, the young Indigenous woman who’d sent the Leak cartoon to the commission withdrew her complaint, saying she could not cope with the harassment she felt she’d received from News Corp. Leak died the next year; The Australian ran an astonishing 33,000 words of tribute and then established an award in his name, which it has repeatedly bestowed on his son. 

Well yes, the pond does remember that fuss well, but there's no need to repeat that offensive 'toon again.

The pond also remembers this cartoon, a valiant attempt to kick Godwin's Law into a Leakian ether ...

And so did Sparrow ...

Given the paper’s current obsession with Cathy Wilcox, we might, then, recall another Bill Leak cartoon, from the height of the obsession with 18C. In September that year, Leak turned his artistic genius to the subject of equal marriage, producing an image showing gay men goose-stepping in rainbow-coloured Nazi uniforms, which he labelled “Waffen-SSM”. 
Had Wilcox invoked National Socialism in her work, the outrage from The Australian would have, of course, registered on the Richter scale. But though Leak’s drawing affronted both Jewish and gay and lesbian groups, a year later Chris Kenny still celebrated the Nazi gag as an example of Leak’s “provocative and hilarious insights” and “a biting comment on the intolerance of gay marriage activists”.
You obviously don’t need to trawl the paper’s archives for evidence of conservative hypocrisy. In today’s edition, Catherine West calls for an investigation of “how the deliberate merging of domestic hate with foreign policy serves to silence opposition to prejudice”, while, nearby, Nick Dyrenfurth flatly equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. 
But it’s worth recalling the Leak brouhaha because it shows how sharply the Gaza genocide has reoriented a conservative movement that once prided itself on its “fuck your feelings” free speech advocacy. Back in the day, the right rallied around Leak because, as Paul Gravitas explained, “Bill saw the heart of political correctness is denial and avoidance of truth. The purpose is to reject rational debate through new norms of so-called polite behaviour — that people must not be offended, that feelings must not be insulted and that identity, whether arising from race, religion, sexuality or gender, must always be honoured.”
Today, The Australian applauds the Adelaide Festival for cutting a Palestinian author on the grounds of “cultural sensitivity”. Whereas, in 2016, it denounced, as a matter of principle, any cultural infrastructure that might limit Leak’s ability to mock Indigenous peoples.
In 2026, it publishes Steven Lowy declaring: “Australia needs its cultural, educational, business and civic leaders to actively model and defend pluralistic values. We need leaders in schools to explain why diversity makes us stronger. We need them in boardrooms to demonstrate that inclusion is not a compliance exercise but a competitive advantage. We need them in community centres to build bridges between groups that fear each other.”
Funnily enough, that laudable new enthusiasm for pluralism and inclusion doesn’t extend to the people of Gaza, where, as both Amnesty International and B’Tselem have recently documented, the genocide continues. 
Someone should draw a cartoon about it.

Back at the lizard Oz, the reptiles continued their weird double standards, though this reptile travelling as Steve Jackson only managed a two minute read on the affair  ...

The header: Cartoonist Cathy Wilcox lashes out after Nine’s half-hearted apology; No one appears to be happy after Nine apologised for publishing a now-notorious illustration about the push for a royal commission into anti-Semitism … not least the cartoonist who drew it.

The caption for the jihad victim: Cartoonist Cathy Wilcox.

The reptiles were keen to push the fuss, thereby doing down both Wilcox and the pathetic Nine rags ...

Nine’s half-hearted apology for publishing Cathy Wilcox’s “divisive” cartoon about the royal commission into anti-Semitism has done little to appease outraged readers on either side of the furore.
Both Wilcox’s critics and defenders have sledged the mastheads after they belatedly acknowledged the distress and hurt the image had caused “many in the community” – with even the illustrator herself taking a veiled swipe at her editors.
The now notorious cartoon, which portrayed those pushing for an inquiry into rising anti-­Semitism following the atrocity as being secretly manipulated by ­Coalition figures and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ­attracted an immediate backlash after it was printed in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age last Wednesday.
The image’s detractors accused it of “trivialising mass murder” in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack and playing on age-old anti-Semitic tropes.

Amazingly, Stevo used an X'er, cohabiting with Grok, promoter of falsehoods and nude deep fakes, to reproduce the cartoon ...Bondi Beach massacre survivor Arsen Ostrovsky responds to Wilcox's controversial cartoon.

Hang on, hang on, if it's so disturbing and offensive, why keep reproducing and circulating it? 

If it's an "unadulterated form of Jew-hatred" why keep airing it, especially on a cesspit forum notorious for giving space to anti-Semitism, owned by a man notoriously not afraid to give the Nazi salute?

Who knows, but Wilcox got in a couple of good lines, a nice couple of licks...

Nine refused to comment on the ensuing uproar for five days – neither defending the cartoon nor apologising for it – before doing both on Sunday afternoon in an editorial headlined: “Wilcox cartoon was divisive – and we apologise for the hurt it has caused.”
While offering the papers’ sincere apologies to those offended, the editorial also went to great lengths to justify the tabloids’ decision to publish the picture in the first place, insisting “many of our readers found the cartoon thought-provoking”.
“It is undeniable, however, that many others in the community, particularly Jews, were deeply hurt and offended by it,” the editorial continued. “We have heard their distress and for this pain, we sincerely apologise.”
Following the admission, the tabloids’ went on to defend their cartoonists’ right to “draw the world as they see it”; both mastheads continue to host the illustration on their news sites.
Critics were underwhelmed, claiming the apology lacked sincerity and shifted blame to those who felt the illustration was irresponsible and inflammatory.
Wilcox and her defenders were equally unimpressed and took to social media to express outrage at the tabloids’ contrition within hours of the apology going live.
One social media user, “Rosco The Grouch”, who claims to be a retired secondary school teacher, labelled the apology “Simpering. Sycophantic. Blather” before adding: “So much for the once great SMH. Maybe (Cathy Wilcox) ought to consider joining a paper that has some integrity.”
Somewhat pointedly, Wilcox responded: “Do you know of any?”
The award-winning cartoonist also said she might start sharing some of the abusive feedback she had received about her work.
“When this blows over, I might have to share some of the emails I’ve received … which really make me wonder why I am the one ­accused of hatred,” she wrote. “There is deep unresolved trauma being spewed by some people and we cannot consent to living according to their warped reality.”
And they weren’t the only ones she was keen to have a crack at. Sky News Australia later reported Wilcox sent them “an abusive email” after they sought her thoughts about Nine’s apology.

Sadly, the pond doesn't know any mainstream rags worthy of any other name than rag, and as for Sky Noise down under ... 'cesspit' seems way too kind, given that cesspits have a useful function.

Crikey also had a nice piece on the death of the Adelaide Writers Week by Daanyal Saeed ...

Jacinda Ardern quits Adelaide Festival’s Writers Week in wake of growing boycott
Former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern has quit the Adelaide Festival’s Writers Week in the wake of a boycott around the cancellation of Palestinian-Australian academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah. (sorry, paywall link)

As well as noting the departure of the former NZ PMand the chair, Saeed had this to say ...

...Whiting said in a statement on LinkedIn that “recent decisions were bound by certain undertakings and my resignation enables the Adelaide Festival, as an organisation, to refresh its leadership and its approach to these circumstances”.
Legal representatives for Abdel-Fattah sent a letter to Whiting on January 11 requesting clarification in relation to the “past statements” referred to in the board’s public statement on the matter, which left open the possibility of future litigation.

It so happens that the pond had the first page of that letter to hand ...

Sorry for the interruption ...

The board is yet to make a public comment in respect of the walkouts, and neither the Adelaide Festival nor Adler responded to inquiries from Crikey last week. Amid circling rumours that Writers’ Week would be cancelled altogether, and speculation over how the board can now reach a quorum to make any further decisions, on Monday afternoon, Adelaide Festival Corporation executive director Julian Hobba released a statement calling the circumstances of the boycott “complex and unprecedented”. 
“Following the Adelaide Festival board’s decision on Thursday, 8 January and the significant community response, Adelaide Writers’ Week and Adelaide Festival are navigating a complex and unprecedented moment and will share further updates as soon as we are able,” the statement read. 
CAA Speakers, the firm responsible for Ardern’s speaking engagements, was contacted for comment but did not respond in time for publication.
The front page of the Adelaide-based News Corp tabloid paper The Advertiser on January 12 was dedicated to the controversy, titled “JEEZ LOUISE” with a full-page photograph of Adler, who led the Adelaide Festival last year to record attendances.

Ah the reptiles, always in the thick of it, always stirring up trouble ...

Talk about the suffering of a parochial one rag town ...

By sublime coincidence ... a demonstration that the 'Tiser has all the imagination of a coffee shop ...

Then came a count of the numbers of the tape, possibly already outdate ...

Artists and sponsors have continued to pull out of the festival as a result of the decision. InDaily reports that day two of Tryp, the contemporary music program, has been abandoned, with every artist having pulled out and a festival drinks sponsor, Mischief Brewing, also dropping out.
InDaily reports that Adelaide Festival made $472,000 last year, up from a loss of $825,000 in 2024. According to the festival’s own impact report, it had a $47.1 million net impact on gross state product last year, with 365,402 total attendees.
The list of Writers’ Week boycotting participants has grown to around 90, with the festival’s website stating (before its lineup page was taken down as a result of the boycott) that it was hosting 123 speakers. 

What could the reptiles do, but shoot down Louise more, by bringing in reprehensible, disreputable Morry, an ongoing threat to his own brand? C.f. The Sunday Paper... which definitely has an axe to grind ...

And so on, and meanwhile, the lizard Oz hit piece ran under the header Culture, as if the reptiles didn't understand that what they had was a Kultur and it ran on for a goodly, bigly five minutes, or so the reptiles clocked it ...

The header: Publisher Morry Schwartz accuses director of ‘wounding’ Adelaide Writers Week, Influential publisher Morry Schwartz has accused Adelaide Writers Week director Louise Adler of deliberately ‘wounding’ it by programming a controversial Palestinian writer as Adelaide Festival board faces collapse with fresh resignations.
The author: Tim Douglas
The ticking clock: January 13, 2026 - 6:37AM
The caption for the collage: Adelaide Writers’ Week boss Louise Adler; publisher Morry Schwartz; academic Randa Abdel-Fattah.

Morry, it should go without saying, is a biased, paranoid witness, exactly the kind the reptiles would turn to ...especially as he sought them out by way of letter to carry on his personal jihad ...

Influential publisher Morry Schwartz says Adelaide Writers Week boss Louise Adler has intentionally “wounded” the literary festival, claiming the director knew programming controversial Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah would imperil the event’s future.
In a letter to The Australian, Mr Schwartz claimed Ms Adler’s “obsessive cause” was to blame for the fallout at AWW, where more than 70 authors reportedly had publicly withdrawn and four Adelaide Festival board members, including chair Tracey Whiting, had resigned.
“It’s clearly Louise Adler who has wounded Adelaide Writers’ Week – not the board, nor the SA government,” wrote Mr Schwartz, owner of Schwartz Media, publisher of Black Inc Books, The Saturday Paper and Quarterly Essay.
“Adler well knew that including Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah (‘if you are a Zionist you have no claim or right to cultural safety’) would endanger the institution.
“But it mattered nil to her – her obsessive cause is more important to her than our precious 66-year-old writers’ festival.”
Three years ago, Mr Schwartz called for Ms Adler to resign from her position, but for the writers at her festival to remain.

Naturally the preening Morry scored a still showing him posed in his finery, Leading Melbourne publisher Morry Schwartz. Aaron Francis/The Australian

Zionist Morry was given plenty of room to vent his spleen, as the cliché goes ...

“Back then she programmed eight pro-Palestinian activists, with zero alternative voices. One, Mohammed El-Kurd, compared Israel to Nazis and defended someone who tweeted that she wanted ‘to kill every motherf..king Zionist’, ‘curse the Jews’, and who supported Hamas. Others weren’t far behind.”
Ms Adler and the Adelaide Festival were contacted for comment. The decision by the festival board, which oversees Adelaide Writers’ Week, to withdraw Dr Abdel-Fattah’s invitation over historic comments about Israel was made without Ms Adler’s input. She is yet to speak publicly.

The desire to erase Palestinians here is almost as strong as the desire for ethnic cleansing currently promoted by the government of Israel.

Eventually the reptiles had to get over Morry and report on the disaster that the reptile jihad and Zionists had produced ...

The decision came after a review into programming at the Adelaide event in the wake of the Bondi terror attack that killed 15 people. While the board made clear Dr Abdel-Fattah in no way was associated with the Bondi attack, it said it would not be “culturally appropriate” to keep her on the program. The decision sparked the mass boycott by authors including headliners Orange prize winner Zadie Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett, Australian literary doyenne Helen Garner, Miles Franklin winner Melissa Lucashenko and ABIA prize winner Trent Dalton. Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern was confirmed on Monday evening to also have cancelled her festival appearance with the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson on March 3. The Australia Institute think tank pulled its funding from the event, and on Instagram publisher Hardie Grant publicly condemned the decision to disinvite Dr Abdel-Fattah, saying: “We cannot support an environment where festivals are destroyed when considered programming decisions are overridden by politicians and boards.”

There came a snap of the victim Randa Abdel-Fattah. Picture Instagram/@randaafattah

The reptiles then attempted a little "straight" reporting, though it doesn't really fit their kultur ...

The prestigious festival’s future remains in jeopardy, in the wake of four of the eight Adelaide Festival board members, including Ms Whiting, having resigned. Journalist and broadcaster Daniela Ritorto, businesswoman Donny Walford and lawyer Nick Linke tendered their resignations at the weekend. Ms Whiting said in a statement: “Recent decisions were bound by certain undertakings and my resignation enables the Adelaide Festival, as an organisation, to refresh its leadership and its approach to these circumstances.”
The board now finds itself in a critical situation, with just three remaining members – Adelaide councillor Mary Couros, former Labor SA government minister Leesa Chesser and Adelaide Airport managing director Brenton Cox – along with government observer Jennifer Fuller. A festival spokeperson was contacted to clarify the board’s ability to operate with respect to guidelines under the Adelaide Festival Corporation Act 1998. The Act stipulates at least two women and two men must comprise the board.
The news came as an updated letter demanding Dr Abdel-Fattah’s reinstatement, signed by six other former Adelaide Festival directors, was sent to the remaining board members.
Robyn Archer, Peter Sellars, Ruth Mackenzie, Stephen Page, Paul Grabowsky and Penny Chapman added their names to the open letter. They join other big names of the Australian arts sector, who have run the country’s most prestigious cultural jamboree at various stages since 1975, including Neil Armfield, Rob Brookman, Jo Dyer, Peter Goldsworthy, Nicholas Heyward, Kath M. Mainland, Ian Scobie, David Sefton, Jim Sharman and Mary Vallentine.
The letter claimed the board had made a “grave mistake” and had brought the festival into disrepute.
“There is one remedy for the justified public outcry at this egregious incursion on free speech and the damaging series of withdrawals it has caused,” it read. “We call upon the board to reinstate Dr Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to the 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week immediately. An about-face may be embarrassing but it is both the right thing to do and will cauterise the growing damage to this much loved and internationally significant South Australian cultural institution.

The one rebel to score a snap was English novelist Zadie Smith. Photo by Brian Dowling/Getty Images

Then it was on to the wrap up, with the reptiles doing their best to tilt the reporting in a way that favoured the banning ...

“Wickedness thrives in darkness and prejudice thrives in ignorance born of silence. The open  discussion of ideas, beliefs, facts and opinion is ultimately the pathway to community cohesion. Silencing and censorship are not.”
Arts Minister Tony Burke on Monday said the government had no involvement in the decisions made by festivals, stepping in to answer a question for Anthony Albanese at a press conference when the Prime Minister was asked if Dr Abdel-Fattah should be reinstated.
“With respect to any writers’ festival, we leave those decisions to the festivals themselves,” Mr Burke said. “We don’t tell festivals who they should put on and who they shouldn’t.”
Greens acting leader Sarah Hanson-Young said Adelaide’s famously strong arts and festival brands were “in tatters”. She called for Dr Abdel-Fattah to be reinstated, claiming South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas had made “an enormous mess” pressuring the board to cancel the writer.
“The Adelaide Festival is now on the brink of collapse and the government needs to act urgently,” Senator Hanson-Young said.
Tasmanian Liberal senator Jonathon Duniam, however, said while he accepted there were freedom of speech concerns, context was key.
“We have just seen the culmination of two years of horrible (anti-Semitic) behaviour, and that resulted in the worst terrorist act on our soil in history, in Bondi, and so we do need to have a degree of sensitivity,” he said. “I would urge those members of the creative community, the other authors who are saying they don’t want to participate in this event because someone has been asked to not participate, think again. There is a space for creative thought. There is a space for freedom of expression. But given some of the things that the individual in question has said in the past, it is definitely the right decision.”
Dr Abdel-Fattah said on Monday “attempts to police speech” were being met with resistance from those in the arts sector.
“No amount of retrospective back-pedalling about vague ‘prior statements’ can obscure the fact that I was formally disinvited on the grounds that my Palestinian identity would act as an emotional provocation,” she told Australian Associated Press.
“It is hard to view the timing as accidental rather than a calculated decision to make the announcement on that particular day and to reinforce the link between me and the Bondi atrocity.”
Dr Abdel-Fattah’s lawyers have sent a letter to the festival board, asking it to identify the exact “past statements” it cited in its announcement that it would cancel the author’s appearance. The legal team has demanded a response by January 14.
Adelaide Festival Corporation executive director Julian Hobba said in a statement on Monday that the “complex” situation was being “navigated”.
“Following the Adelaide Festival board’s decision on Thursday, 8 January and the significant community response, Adelaide Writers’ Week and Adelaide Festival are navigating a complex and unprecedented moment and will share further updates as soon as we are able,” he said.

Discredit where discredit is due ...

ADDITIONAL REPORTING
ELIZABETH PIKE AND SARAH ISON

P.S. Another notch on the hive mind press's and Morry's gun, Louise Adler resigns...

Sadly,  Australia can't in any way match King Donald's current deeds ...but turning a mass terrorist murder into an ongoing political campaign seems to match the King's spirit ...

Meanwhile, for a closer, the lizard Oz editorialist echoed the current concern the King Donald administration has for breeding ...

Pro-natalism is big in King Donald land, but only of a certain kind and colour...

Who gets to be born? Dr. Oz just revealed Trump's strategy. | Opinion
President Donald Trump's administration will stop at nothing to ensure the political dominance of White people in this country.

Just like Adolf ...

Naturally the lizard Oz editorialist heard the call ...

Did you see that closing line?

The reality is we need both, lest we end up like Canada, where domestic fertility is 1.25 and immigration is all that is keeping the country going. And that would not be the Australian way.

Immigration isn't the Australian way?

That's kinda funny. The pond thought most Australians came by way of immigration, but the pond understands ... Aussie blut is the way forward, and we must keep breeding for the Führer. Get to work, vulgar youff ...

And so to the good news in 'toon land. 

The immortal Rowe is back, and so the pond can take it easy at close of Wasserglas play ...

And old reliables like Doonesbury stay in touch with the times ...

He's baaack ... and so is Killer of the IPA ... the bromancer lives, and after many preliminaries, the pond will get to that dance ...

 

Gutless. Cowardly. Shameful. A weak-kneed flip-flopping bout of whining both siderism.

But typical, providing yet another reason not a drop of the pond's money goes to the Nine rags ...

Wilcox cartoon was divisive – and we apologise for the hurt it has caused (*archive link)
The Herald's View
Updated January 11, 2026 — 3.55pm first published at 3.50pm

Even more pathetic was the timid way they dropped it late on a Sunday arvo ...

Inter alia ...

When the pond checked, despite the mealy-mouthed carryon and craven cavorting, the 'toon was still to be found (in 'cartoons of the week', not in 'best of Wilcox'), but the cartoon section seemed to be in a paralysed stasis.

Naturally the reptiles were still on the case. 

When they sense weakness, they go for the throat and hang on like a pitbull ... and offer up outrageous slurs:

Cartoon on royal commission evoked a centuries-old trope about the power of Jews
Conflating anti-Semitism with Middle East politics forces many good people into silence, but being against anti-Semitism does not mean you support Benjamin Netanyahu. (that's an archive link)
By Catherine West

Amazingly, for a cartoon one step short of Adolf, or perhaps Martin Luther, the reptiles managed to reproduce it yet again.

Meanwhile,  the Writers' Festival fuss continued, with SBS on the weekend reporting that board members are now dropping out like hippies on Haight-Ashbury. The chair led the way.

A feeble counter-attack was mounted with reports that Randa Abdel-Fattah joined a cabal to get Thomas Friedman banned the previous year, but the obvious retort is that any Festival that would have Friedman as a speaker must be subject to the Groucho rule - that's not a club anyone should want to belong to.

The reptiles were on that case, with Nick on hand to conflate and confuse...

Writer’s ban about double standards, not free speech
Randa Abdel Fattah’s Writers’ Week punting is an overdue reckoning for cultural hypocrisy. (that's an intermittent archive link)
By Nick Dyrenfurth

Ain't he a wonder. Dropping a writer for political reasons or nervous nelly Adelaide great aunt sensitivities ain't about free speech? George would be proud.

The lizard Oz editorialist also chipped in with a profoundly ironical headline, what with the lizard Oz being a font of hate and endless jihads ...

Cultural left is conspicuous in its tolerance for hate
The stampede by authors to support anti-Israel author Randa Abdel-Fattah shows the extent to which toxic anti-Semitic ideology has been allowed to seep into our institutions.

This from a rag that has been spreading its special brand of poison for decades.

How weird did it get?

EXCLUSIVE
Put immigration policy on royal commission’s agenda: Lowy
Business leader Steven Lowy says freedom and tolerance in Australia is being abused and bigger cultural change is needed.
By Richard Ferguson and Sarah Ison

That was just a seafood extender EXCLUSIVE based on this offering ...

Bondi Beach attack was our wake-up call to act
The Royal Commission into anti-Semitism is welcome, but it cannot be seen as the end of the matter.
By Steven Lowy

If we're going to go down the 'ban Islamics like King Donald wanted to' route, then surely the RC must look into the hate speech emanating from News Corp. This can't be seen as the end of the matter. 

Surely the RC must look to expropriating the assets of a foreign owned disrupter of community harmony?

But chinks are beginning to appear in the reptiles' latest jihad.

The reptiles seem to have begun to realise that there were other things happening in the world, and that a monomaniacal obsession with turning a terrorist slaughter into a political wedge might be a turn off. So they turned on ...

Yes, big splashes and three whole stories, and luckily there's no need to go there, because anyone interested can find the details outside the hive mind.

Speaking of the real world, the pond noticed this yarn in Wired ... it's possibly not the time for the reptiles to indulge in their usual bout of climate science denialism, but just in case ...

The Oceans Just Keep Getting Hotter
For the eighth year in a row, the world’s oceans absorbed a record-breaking amount of heat in 2025. It was equivalent to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools. (here's an intermittent archive link for anyone who might hit a wall).

The opening, a teaser trailer:

Since 2018, a group of researchers from around the world have crunched the numbers on how much heat the world’s oceans are absorbing each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world’s oceans have absorbed more heat than the years before.
The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world’s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules’ worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That’s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules they absorbed in 2024. The research comes from a team of more than 50 scientists across the United States, Europe, and China.
A joule is a common way to measure energy. A single joule is a relatively small unit of measurement—it’s about enough to power a tiny lightbulb for a second, or slightly heat a gram of water. But a zettajoule is one sextillion joules; numerically, the 23 zettajoules the oceans absorbed this year can be written out as 23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
John Abraham, a professor of thermal science at the University of St. Thomas and one of the authors on the paper, says that he sometimes has trouble putting this number into contexts laypeople understand. Abraham offers up a couple options. His favorite is comparing the energy stored in the ocean to the energy of atomic bombs: The 2025 warming, he says, is the energetic equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean. (Some other calculations he’s done include equating this number to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or more than 200 times the electrical use of everyone on the planet.)
“Last year was a bonkers, crazy warming year—that's the technical term,” Abraham joked to me. “The peer-reviewed scientific term is ‘bonkers’.”
The world’s oceans are its largest heat sink, absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess warming that is trapped in the atmosphere. While some of the excess heat warms the ocean’s surface, it also slowly travels further down into deeper parts of the ocean, aided by circulation and currents.
Global temperature calculations—like the ones used to determine the hottest years on record—usually only capture measurements taken at the ocean’s surface. (The study finds that overall sea surface temperatures in 2025 were slightly lower than they were in 2024, which is on record as the hottest year since modern records began. Some meteorological phenomena, like El Niño events, can also raise sea surface temperatures in certain regions, which can cause the overall ocean to absorb slightly less heat in a given year. This helps to explain why there was such a big jump in added ocean heat content between 2025, which developed a weak La Niña at the end of the year, and 2024, which came at the end of a strong El Niño year.) While sea surface temperatures have risen since the industrial revolution, thanks to our use of fossil fuels, these measurements don’t provide a full picture of how climate change is affecting the oceans.
“If the whole world was covered by a shallow ocean that was only a couple feet deep, it would warm up more or less at the same speed as the land,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth and a coauthor of the study. “But because so much of that heat is going down in the deep ocean, we see generally slower warming of sea surface temperatures [than those on land].”

And so on, and at last the pond can speak science ... bonkers ... and there must be a 'toon for all that ...

...and speaking of bonkers, there was another astonishing disruption to the jihad.

At the top of the lizard Oz the jihad took a new turn. There was a new topic, a new target ...

And best of all?

He's baaack ...

Little Greggie with his axe, ready to pound away at assorted doors.

Oh how the pond has waited, oh how correspondents have yearned ...

It's only a three minute read, so the reptiles said, but the pond fell on it like a famished hound that hadn't had a feed in a month:

The header: Ayatollah beware, your brutal Islamo-Stalinst regime is under its greatest threat since 1979, The Iranian regime is still in overall control and becoming vastly more brutal in its crackdown. But neither its survival, nor its collapse, is sure. These demonstrations are unlike anything in post-revolutionary Iran.

The caption: An image showing protesters once again taking to the streets of Tehran despite an intensifying crackdown as the Islamic Republic remains cut off from the rest of the world. (UGC via AP)

Now it's true that the bromancer is in jihad mode, but when is he not?

It's also true that the only apparent difference these days between the mad Mullahs and King Donald is scale.

While King Donald's minions casually murder US citizens in the streets, the mad Mullahs really know how to do it, and indulge in senseless slaughter.

That said, forget King Donald's inclination to authoritarianism.

The bromancer is a specialist in selective rage and singular vision, so he had at the mad Mullahs ...

The dark and murderous vision of theocratic blackness and hatred of the West, and of Jews, which lies at the heart of the Iranian revolution, is under greater threat today than at any time since 1979.
The ayatollahs’ Islamo-Stalinist regime is being challenged by the people who know it best, the Iranian people. Iran is experiencing its biggest anti-government demonstrations since the 1979 overthrow of the shah.
As recently as a week ago, US intelligence assessed that the demonstrations lacked the strength to offer an existential threat to the rule of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the whole theocratic regime. Now, that analysis is much less certain. The protests have been running intensely for two weeks. Tehran has shut down the internet within Iran. When it did this in 2019, it provided cover for widespread massacres of protesters.
Something similar is under way now. Iranian hospitals are overwhelmed trying to treat shot and beaten protesters. Hundreds are dead, thousands imprisoned. Initially, there was some effort by Iranian government leaders to address economic distress and promise mild reform. That tone has now gone entirely. The government now calls protesters “enemies of God”, which means they face the death penalty. Nonetheless, images still emerge of government buildings in flames and huge demonstrations – in at least one case of a million people – in Iranian cities.

The reptiles flung in an AV distraction, Unrest across Iran is escalating as the regime cracks down on government protests amid a major internet blackout.

The bromancer carried on, and who would defend the mad Mullahs against his foam-flecked rage?

The ayatollahs have faced waves of huge demonstrations before. Dictatorships typically fall in one of four circumstances – when they begin to liberalise, when the leadership becomes divided and some side with the protesters, when a government loses administrative capability or when an outside power decisively assists the revolutionaries.
The Iranian regime is still in overall control and becoming vastly more brutal in its crackdown. But neither its survival, nor its collapse, is sure. The next weeks are critical. These demonstrations are unlike anything in post-revolutionary Iran.
First, they are at their foundation economic, initially led by shopkeepers, a class slow to anger but dreadfully dangerous to any regime. Iran, inheritor of the great Persian civilisation, has a sophisticated urban class that hates the regime. But that class alone can never prevail. These demonstrations include the working class, unionists, farmers, villagers.
Secondly, it’s clear now to all Iranians except for devoted theocrats and the ruling class itself that the Islamic revolution has brought nothing but misery and despair. The people hate the regime and hate the way they are forced to live.

Then came another visual interruption: This image from a video released on January 9, 2026, by Iranian state television shows a man holding a device to document burning vehicles during a night of mass protests in Zanjan, Iran. (Iranian state TV via AP)

The bromancer saw King Donald as an avenging angel, and never mind the vengeance doled out by his ICE minions:

Third, the regime is weaker than it’s been for decades. The relentless pursuit of the nuclear program, designed to provide an Iranian bomb, has delivered nothing but sanctions and the devastating Israeli and US military strikes. As with Venezuela, vaunted air defences proved worthless.
The Iranian leaders made a terrible blunder, perhaps on a par with Nicolas Maduro’s miscalculations in Venezuela, in refusing US President Donald Trump’s offer of economic engagement in exchange for abandoning the nuclear program. The Iranian people yearned for such a deal, for normality and prosperity.
Importantly, all those analysts, who represented a strong consensus among the international relations class, who argued that Israeli and US strikes would only unify Iranian sentiment behind the government and against the West have been proven completely wrong. Far from experiencing a patriotic surge of support, the Iranian government has never been more comprehensively loathed by its own people, who daily risk death in trying to change the regime.

There came a final visual distraction, This image, taken from anonymous user-generated video via AFPTV on January 10, 2026 shows a protester pulling down the Iranian flag from the balcony of Iran's embassy in central London. (Photo by Handout / various sources / AFP)

A hint of doubt crept into the narrative:

Trump has threatened to strike Iran if it kills its people in large numbers, as it has done in previous crackdowns. It’s hard to see how this would lead directly to regime change. But it’s a remarkable intervention. The US President is backing demonstrators seeking freedom and, as far as we can tell, the demonstrators are glad of any support they can get.

Yes, they can die in the streets, while King Donald makes vague threats and useless promises.

And then came an astonishing rewriting of history, as only the bromancer can do ...

Then there’s the role of the exiled crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah to rule Iran. The shah lost power not because he was too brutal, though his rule was brutal, but because he began to liberalise and provided space for the organised Islamist forces to lead a broad social movement, which they betrayed as soon as they seized power.

The Shah a liberal? C.f. the wiki on the subject...

The revolution was fueled by widespread perceptions of the Shah's regime as corrupt, repressive, and overly reliant on foreign powers, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom. Many Iranians felt that the Shah's government was not acting in the best interests of the Iranian people and that it was too closely aligned with Western interests, especially at the expense of Iranian sovereignty and cultural identity.

There were many other reasons - see the wiki for a detailed breakdown of events - but the result was most unfortunate, a classic case of jumping from the frypan into the fire, of the kind that King Donald supporters have done as they FAFO'd.

The bromancer couldn't resist one final illiberal flourish, worthy of a Khomeini:

One factor in the regime’s favour this time is that it’s unclear that the protesters, courageous as they are, have coherent leadership. But protesters have responded in surprising numbers to Pahlavi’s calls to take specific actions on specific days, and have taken to displaying the old lion-and-sun flag of pre-revolutionary Iran. The enduring appeal of monarchy in the Islamic world asserts itself once more.
The Iranian government characterises the vast social movement it’s confronting as an Israeli conspiracy, like Cathy Wilcox cartoon writ large.
Brave Iranians are daily dying for freedom. Naturally there are no left-wing demonstrations in their support in the West. But they do have Trump.

He had to drag Wilcox into the affair? 

And he dismissed King Donald with an imperious wave of the bromancer hand?

And the world still cast in that black and white, leftists bad, King Donald if not good, then somewhat endearing mind set?

Oh he'll never change, he'll always be the same old lover of the onion muncher ...and with any luck he'll help steer the lizard Oz into new jihads and provide ways for the pond to avoid the current RC jihad.

As for King Donald, luckily Killer of the IPA was on hand to talk about the monster in affectionate terms.

Sure it's day old stuff, but when has Killer of the IPA ever tasted stale and soggy?

The header: Trump’s ‘shock and awe’ in Venezuela reveals US naked self-interest; Trump’s brazen Venezuelan intervention has finally buried the so-called rules-based global order that never truly existed, leaving Australia in an awkward position.

The caption for the king in sociopathic smirk mode: President Donald Trump. ‘For all Trump’s talk of peace and the presumed isolationist bent of his administration, the President already has bombed at least a half-dozen countries.’ Picture: AP

Killer spoke in favour of King Donald the way a fervent Stephen Miller might manage. 

It was realpolitik all the way.

Henry Kissinger would have been proud. 

Perhaps not since Theodore Roosevelt has a US president been so blunt about the real reason America intervenes abroad: naked self-interest.
Members of Donald Trump’s MAGA base shouldn’t fear their children are about to die in the jungles of Venezuela in another doomed attempt to export democracy. They should admire their President’s candour.
Trump made no serious effort to cloak the seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, last week in the familiar language of freedom, humanitarianism or international law.
Instead, Trump spoke openly about monopolising Venezuela’s vast oil reserves for American benefit – a clarity that finally buried the so-called rules-based global order, which never truly existed anyway.
It’s hard to imagine even those diehard spruikers of the fictitious global order, Defence Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, uttering the phrase for years now that the ultimate guarantor of our security didn’t even attempt to cloak its brazen intervention as anything other than America First.
The outrage was understandable among the UN set – many thousands of high-paying bureaucratic jobs hinge on at least lip service to international law – but not the surprise.
For all Trump’s talk of peace and the presumed isolationist bent of his administration, the President already has bombed at least a half-dozen countries – including Somalia, Nigeria and Iran – not even one year into his second term. That’s far more than Joe Biden did in his entire four years in office.
The Venezuela move was “shock and awe”, Trump-style: no boots on the ground, no rhetoric about democracy or the enforcement of international law.
Trump was putting his administration’s freshly minted national security strategy into action.
“We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere,” the 33-page security strategy document states, describing what it calls the “Trump corollary” to the well-known Monroe Doctrine.

Cue an AV distraction featuring an image likely to stir a reptile almost as much as a lump of coal:  U.S. President Donald Trump began a meeting to discuss Venezuela with executives from some of the world's largest oil companies at the White House on Friday, saying he wants them to invest $100 billion in the country to vastly expand its production. Alex Cohen has more.

Killer saw it all as a glorious, unambiguous triumph:

It remains an unambiguous victory for Trump, who has shaken off the TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) accusation, and the US, which demonstrated its unrivalled ability to project power only months after a brilliant high-stakes bombing operation in Iran.
Whatever cover Trump’s “illegal” action supposedly gives Russia and China to behave similarly is dwarfed by their military and economic humiliation.
Energy-poor China, which must import about three-quarters of its oil, had seen Venezuela as a reliable supplier. Meanwhile Trump has deprived Moscow of billions of dollars’ worth of future arms sales to Caracas and highlighted the worthlessness of a freshly inked strategic partnership that Maduro signed with Russia last year.

But then came the downers, with several very big billy goat butts:

But the tactical success of Trump’s intervention victory could easily become a long-term strategic loss, not to mention the ongoing awkwardness for Australia in particular.
Venezuela’s oil reserves, which oil-exporting America doesn’t even need, are no El Dorado, costing more to extract per barrel than the prevailing oil price, owing to their poor quality and the difficulties of pumping them.
Top US oil executives, predictably, told Trump at the White House last week they wouldn’t invest the $US100bn ($149bn) required to update Venezuela’s dilapidated oil infrastructure without investment certainty, which is impossible without US boots on the ground – something Trump is unlikely to countenance.
The Venezuelan military, not to mention the families of the 80-odd Venezuelans killed in the US operation, aren’t likely to warm to US orders in coming months.
Maduro’s regime, which has brazenly stolen elections and presided over one of the biggest collapses in national income of any nation in modern history, is still in control.
New interim president Delcy Rodriguez, a veteran left-wing revolutionary, has a track record of publicly hating the US. Trump’s disregard for opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who symbolically offered her Nobel Peace Prize to the US President, won’t please pro-democracy forces within Venezuela either; they’ve realised their initial dancing in the street at the prospect of a new democratic government was rather premature.

Hah, hapless peasants, how Killer chortled with glee, as the reptiles interrupted with another AV distraction (is Killer that boring he always needs some relief?): Two leading members of Venezuela's political opposition were freed in a prisoner release on Thursday (January 8), according to local rights group Foro Penal and videos shared by Venezuelan journalists.

Downsides hurled into the distance, Killer carried on with his Millerisms:

Even if the US could miraculously lift Venezuelan output from roughly one million barrels a day to the three million it once produced in the 1970s, OPEC simply would adjust supply to neutralise any meaningful price impact. The US doesn’t even need the oil.
What Trump has achieved is a tactical victory, not a strategic one – and potentially a long-term loss. His audacious act will harden opposition to the US, which is no longer as relatively powerful as it once was in the immediate aftermath of the World War II era.
The spectacle of the US, home to only 4 per cent of the world’s population, dragging a foreign leader of a mid-sized nation before a domestic US court, whatever the accuracy of the charges, won’t sit well with many actual and future heads of state.
Russia and China, not to mention other South American nations, newly fearful of US power, will have strong incentives to redouble their defence spending and in particular their counter-espionage operations.
Trump publicly slammed US defence contractor Raytheon last week, but that industry is the only clear winner long term.
Almost two years ago I wrote an unpopular column in these pages arguing “there is not, and never was, a rules-based global order, despite our politicians’ fondness for evoking it”. I hate to gloat but we now have yet more evidence.
That’s cold comfort, though, given Australia’s near total reliance on the US – a nation most of our biggest trading partners and neighbours must privately if not publicly loathe even more – for our defence.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

What odd discordant notes on the back palate.

Cold comfort aside, is there any difference between Killer and his heroes?

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper of CNN on Monday, during a combative appearance in which he was pressed on Mr. Trump’s long-held desire to control Greenland.
“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said.

How Adolf would have been proud, and there's more for those with a taste for it at the both siderist NY Times (intermittent archive link):

Stephen Miller Offers a Strongman’s View of the World
President Trump’s trusted adviser is casting his hard-right gaze abroad, saying the world must be governed by “force.” 

Why is it that weedy types of the vampire Miller and Killer of the IPA kind are so devoted to the notion of brute power?

Did they suffer in childhood?

Roll on the taking of Greenland, and after that Canada (elbows up Canucks), with Killer of the IPA cheering from the sidelines; roll on Vlad the sociopath and his attempts to expand his repressive regime, with Killer of the IPA congratulating him on so much winning ...

For that matter, roll on mad Mullahs, with your repression just part of the iron laws that ruled the world since the beginning of time.

As for being an Xian, what the heck was that all about? Love, it seems, comes out of the barrel of a gun.

Watch out New Zealand, so many sheep make you a tempting target for Albo seeking a distraction from his woes ...

And so to finish with a few 'toons ...