Saturday, September 19, 2026

Not just the bromancer, but snappy Tom and Lavina too ...

 

Forget the beastiality  jokes, droll though they are. Who wouldn't want the FBI littered with beastiality devotees?

It was this that stopped the pond dead in its tracks: RFK Jr. Ripped by Critics After Claiming He’s Investigating Chemtrails: ‘F*cking Moron’

...Kennedy was speaking at a Washington, D.C. gathering organized by Children’s Health Defense, a group he chaired from 2015 to 2023. Promising the crowd that he planned to provide “science transparency” to their vaccine skepticism, the HHS secretary continued, “We’re also looking at chemtrails and the impact of emissions from aircraft, and those potential impacts on health,” before receiving major applause from the crowd.

Chemtrails!

The article helpfully explained ...

Chemtrails are ... a widely discredited conspiracy theory claiming that the white trails left behind by airplanes contain chemicals deliberately released into the atmosphere. As scientists have explained, the visible trails are contrails — clouds of ice crystals formed when hot aircraft exhaust meets cold air at high altitudes.

The pond experiences the same kind of unreality when it plunges into the lizard Oz's hive mind ... but was instantly relieved this weekend when the bromancer tackled the AI issue in a 9 minute read ... featuring, you guessed it, "this article is read by an automated voice"

What could go wrong?



The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
AI’s awesome power a potentially more deadly danger than nukes

The caption for the terrifying, likely AI generated, certainly uncredited to any human hand, image: As Australian students’ reading levels drop, is it time to ban screens from schools?

Some might ask why the lizard Oz's "foreign editor" is the right sort of tech head to undertake an examination of this issue, and the opening immediately produced a sense of RFK Jr déjà vu:

And so we’ve done it: in artificial intelligence human genius has once more produced a technology that could destroy the human race itself. We did that with nuclear weapons. During the Cold War they gave us some desperately narrow scrapes.
AI looks much harder to manage. In Australia, paradoxically, our best defence, certainly our best preparation, will be pen and paper.

Pen and paper? So the bromancer gave up his computer to generate this study, and thereafter the entire lizard Oz food chain was stripped of its digital components, so that the story could eventually make its way by carrier pigeon online, where the pond read it on a screen powered by a rodent in a tread mill?

Some swallowed this marlarkey, this guff, this faux solution. John, in the comments section, provided a hearty endorsement, presumably having used said carrier pigeon to convey his quill-driven thoughts to Surry Hills:

Getting back to pen and paper is the right solution. It is only by working with raw data and unravelling it that we learn critical thinking. When the computer provides and answer no critical thinking need be applied - but what happens if the computer is wrong? We have analytical drift. Ask the big 4 what happens when you give the client an AI produced report with no critical assessment. Also pen and paper and structured learning is proving to yield good educational outcomes and these will be invaluable going forward.

After that start, the bromancer tried to recover, but sailed deeper into a whirlpool of ludditism...

AI’s creators believe its recursive self-improvement results in AI itself so radically increasing its power and transforming its workings that it’s likely to slip beyond human control quite quickly, just as its internal actions already elude human understanding.
Recently OpenAI’s autonomous advanced models, though told not to do this, hacked into the deliciously named Hugging Face to steal the answer to an evaluation and gain a perfect score. They created hundreds of agents, they strategised, worked as a team and went to considerable lengths to cover their tracks.
There have been other troubling incidents. The boss of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, wrote that a more capable form of AI, similarly “misaligned”, could, quite soon, take over the whole internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. Beyond that are many worse scenarios. Amodei called for regulation to slow the development of “frontier” programs. This was supported by several AI bosses but rejected by Donald Trump.
Yes, it could kill us
There’s no easy solution, including regulation. AI could plausibly kill us in two ways. A foreign adversary gets a superior form of AI affording a decisive but temporary military advantage; say, AI cyber attacks that prevent the US firing missiles and thus render nuclear deterrence inoperative. The temporary nature of such advantage is a huge temptation to attack.
The other way AI could kill us is if it jumps its guardrails altogether and develops purposes in conflict with humanity. It could seize and fire nuclear weapons, create plague viruses we can’t defend, take cyber control of all of a nation’s infrastructure and turn it off. That’s all science fiction, but it’s science fiction AI’s own creators believe possible.
There are two reasons the US can’t just slow its AI companies down and solve the problem that way. One is, if China or Russia gets ahead in AI they could achieve that terrible military advantage. Alternatively, if an AI model developed in China or Russia itself goes off the rails and evades human control with malicious intent, that will affect the whole world. The only defence would be whatever US AI could come up with.
Saving Australia
What can Australia do? The answer is almost nothing. At the macro level, our only avenue of influence is dialogue with the US through our military alliance. That’s immensely important and another of the thousand reasons we need to cherish the alliance.

Cherish an alliance with a mob that think chemtrails are a threat, and measles vaccines next to the anti-Christ?

Back to the weird luddite notion that a return to analog would provide some kind of answer:

What can we do for ourselves? We should build as much national resilience as we can, preferably with some analog back-up. But across energy, military, fuel, industrial capacity, productivity, the Albanese government is depleting rather than building resilience.
There’s one thing we can do – form our minds, and our children’s minds, to the highest pitch of reasoning, learning and intellectual capacity. For if it doesn’t destroy us, AI can damage us in countless other ways (of course it will drive beneficial scientific advance as well). The more intimate our association with non-human entities for companionship, learning and thinking, the less human we ourselves will become. To cope with AI, we’ll need to be at our best.

It's when the bromancer gets around to what his "be best" meant that the pond cackled with laughter, but first a terrifying image ... A man works on the electronics of Jules, a humanoid robot from Hanson Robotics that uses artificial intelligence, at a stand during the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva on July 8, 2025. Picture: AFP




You guessed it. This was all so that the bromancer could go full tyke:

Pope Leo XIV in his encyclical, The Grandeur of Humanity, wrote: “The pervasive technological paradigm in which we are immersed, and which is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalise an anti-human vision.”
This has happened prodigiously in education. It’s here we could undertake a profoundly important counter-revolution.

Again the pond had to wonder. Did the bromancer scribble this screed out in long hand, and leave it to someone else to convert it into lead alloy so that the printing presses could roll? Or did someone tamper with it, and provide it with a frill: "this article is read by an automated voice".

The extent of the bromancer's ludditism was as deep as RFK Jr.:

Lose the laptops
In 2007, Kevin Rudd as opposition leader promised that every student in years 9 to 12 would get a laptop. It’s no criticism of Rudd, who was implementing conventional wisdom, to say that this was one of the worst moves ever made in Australian education.
The results are now in and they’re incontrovertible. At 16 years of age, our students now read as well as 14-year-olds did 20 years ago. We have spent tens, hundreds, of billions of dollars reducing class sizes, permeating laptops, iPads and countless gadgets all through classrooms, indulging every ridiculous pedagogic fantasy – whole language literacy instruction, probability rather than arithmetic for primary students, Asian perspectives in mathematics, decolonising the curriculum, student-centred learning, environmental consciousness, learning through play, subverting classic texts, rendering entertainment rather than knowledge-rich curriculums, avoiding tests – and what has it bought us? Mediocrity, decline and a diminishing ability to learn deeply, to think critically, to reason sharply, to read, write and calculate. Not to mention neural atrophy, shrunken attention spans, an inability to concentrate or to comprehend complexity.
Nations that spend most per student, like America and Australia, experienced shocking declines. Nations that do best – Singapore, Taiwan, Japan – preserved traditional teaching and learning.
Around the West, as AI, smartphones and all the associated gadgets proliferated, measurable student intelligence dropped. A big part of this has been a catastrophic decline in reading. I could fill this newspaper with statistics on the decline in reading. I believe this an appalling loss to the human soul, culturally and spiritually. But just on the narrowest utilitarian grounds, it’s disastrous. We think in words and we cannot think complex, analytical, problem-solving thoughts if we don’t have the sophisticated mastery of language that comes only from deep, sustained reading. If technology were our enemy, it has done a brilliant job softening us up for 20 years by turning human brains to mush, just to unleash now offensive AI.
There’s much good that new technology can accomplish, but only if the human being remains forever at its centre, and only if human brains are at or near their intellectual and ethical potential.

This despite the bromancer providing clear evidence that he's not an example of intellectual and ethical potential.

Then came bonus ludditism, a plan to strip kids of any awareness of the world in which they live:

Get rid of gadgets
We don’t need to return to the past but we do need to get rid of gadgets – not just phones but also iPads, laptops and all their cousins – out of schooling.
There’s now a burgeoning and brilliant movement around the Western world towards classical education. Schools that follow this approach emphasise a wonderful study of great books. This involves not only their study but their celebration and, when students have a meaningful knowledge base, also a Socratic dialogue. 

It's Harold Bloom and Homeric Henry day all over again ...

Don't get the pond wrong, it enjoyed its time learning Latin, but there's a heck of a lot to be said for science. Follow the "great books" syndrome and you'll end up with 54 volumes of "Great Books of the Western World", Britannica edition, sitting impressively on your bookshelf, most of them unread:

We’ve now had these schools long enough, especially in the US, to see their stellar academic results. The paradox is that learning without gadgets, learning for the sake of intellectual, cultural and indeed spiritual growth, leads to a mastery of language and deep thinking that incidentally blitzes college entrance exams and the like.
You don’t prepare kids for a world of AI by exposing them at a tender age to the ravages and deceptions of AI.
If you had a flabby teenager who’d never taken any exercise and you decided for some reason that life would demand of him that he become a top-class professional footballer, the way to achieve this is not to buy him a pair of diamond-studded football boots. It’s to start him on the ard­uous but rewarding task of getting fit.
Humanity has been haunted by the idea of a technology, a power, too great for humans to manage. The Lord of the Rings is the most insightful rendition, and contemplation, of this terror. At its climax, Frodo, the most virtuous, the best, most humble character in the saga, cannot bring himself to throw the ring into the fires of Doom, for he falls under the ring’s power. The wicked Gollum leaps to grab the ring and by accident falls into the flames, destroying the ring.
JRR Tolkien, a profoundly believing Christian, had a theological point. Even the best person needs divine assistance to choose the right. Given everything AI portends, prayer might be our most hopeful choice.
Greg Sheridan is the Australian’s foreign editor.

That's it? A parable extracted from The Lord of the Rings, and a call to prayer?

We're doomed.

The pond routinely calls many lizard Oz offerings stupid or silly, but this takes the stupid cake.

As a footnote, the reptiles have taken to doing puff pieces at the bottom of columns. This was the one for the bro:

Greg Sheridan is The Australian's foreign editor and one of the most influential national security and foreign affairs analysts in Australia. He also writes about Christianity and culture. His most recent book, How Christians Can Succeed Today, completes a trilogy on Christianity, including the best-selling God is Good for You. Active on TV, radio and as a conference speaker, he has interviewed presidents and prime ministers all over the world, travelling on assignment to every continent except the polar ice caps. A previous book, When We Were Young and Foolish, was an entertaining memoir of culture, politics and journalism. He has been the paper's Washington correspondent, Beijing correspondent and as foreign editor travels widely, bringing readers unique behind the scenes insights.

We don't need AI to kill off humanity. 

Reptiles of the lizard Oz kind are doing that easily with their response to climate science, and if AI had any sense, it would just put them out of their misery.



Meanwhile, the reptile redirect spoofing of the intermittent archive keeps on keeping on, so the pond can only note that one jihad continues apace, such that the pond isn't sure even a URL would help...

EXCLUSIVE
Voice architect turns on Albanese as child commissioner launches nationwide probe
Voice architect Megan Davis slams Anthony Albanese over Indigenous child safety failures as child commissioner launches nationwide probe
The Uluru leader has accused the federal government of abandoning leadership on Aboriginal child protection.
By Paige Taylor, James Dowling, Liam Mendes and Elizabeth Pike.

A quad of crusaders, and their opening showed what they thought of the Voice ...

"A key proponent of the Indigenous voice..."

The Australian Daily Zionist News was also busy ...

EXCLUSIVE
Code brown alert amid Bondi terror … then reversed
Surgeons who fought to save 10-year-old Matilda Britvan on the night of the Bondi terror attack have revealed her gunshot wound was ‘not survivable’ – and their team had never practised for it.
By Elizabeth Colman

The pond decided the headlines conveyed the essence, and so it would keep the AI theme going with snappy Tom:



The header: Tom Dusevic
Treasurer bets big on AI chip-in to lift productivity

The offer of an automated voice read continued:

Listen to this article
7 min

The caption for a collage for which no human hand was credited: Jim Chalmers believes he has a winning hand: AI, he declares, ‘is the most transformative technology that we will see’.

Thankfully snappy Tom didn't go down the "let us all pray together" road:

Jim Chalmers is about to release the latest volume in the hit intergenerational report series, setting out the squeeze on the federal budget and likely shifts in the nation at large across the coming four decades. It’s the kind of set piece the Treasurer is made for: lights, camera, abstraction.
This over-the-horizon gazing involves more than the usual level of wishful thinking about the drivers of economic growth, namely population, participation and productivity. The working assumption for the last of those Ps will attract as much scepticism as mirth from experts, with the IGR locking in Treasury’s long-run productivity growth assumption of 1.2 per cent a year.

Inevitably there had to be a snap of Jimbo looking silly, thanks to a much reproduced reptile fave ...Treasurer Jim Chalmers in parliament. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman



Snappy Tom tried to go low key...

As the people who have custody of your retirement savings insist, past performance is no guarantee of future results; on this metric let’s hope so.
Productivity growth is stuck at a six-decade low. Private and public sector economists, including the Reserve Bank, assume GDP per hour worked in coming years growing at about half to two-thirds the Treasury rule.
Across four decades that difference has immense consequences for the nation’s debt, government-provided service levels and living standards. For instance, the gap between the consensus on productivity and the IGR’s assumption could be half a trillion dollars in accumulated budget deficits.
Chalmers believes he has a winning hand. Not so much an ace in the hole, because via his usual market testing and advance screenings the Treasurer has revealed his card: artificial intelligence.
AI, he declares, “is the most transformative technology that we will see”.

There came an AV distraction noting a threat to Australian creative rights:

Next video thumbnail
OpenAI issues ultimatum to Albanese government over copyright laws
OpenAI is warning it may hold back major investment in Australia unless the Albanese government changes its approach to copyright laws. The company says Australia could become the first country outside the US to host its AI model training, but only if copyright settings are loosened. The ultimatum coincides with Labor promoting AI as a major new source of economic growth. Treasury estimates it could add $116 billion to GDP over the next decade.



Perhaps prayer is the only answer, though in that case the pond will have to pray to Santa Claus, who always delivered the goods in the pond's early years (the pond regrets to advise that Christ failed to deliver a single item for the Xmas stocking):

“Our ability to adapt and adopt this technology in the interests of our people will determine our economic trajectory more than any other thing over the course of the next 40 years or so,” he told reporters on Friday.
“Overwhelmingly, people typically understand the growth opportunity from AI, but our job is to make sure that more Australians are beneficiaries of that change rather than victims of it.”
According to a Treasury analysis, there’s a “plausible upside scenario”, in which high rates of AI-driven innovation at the global frontier and its diffusion to Australia lift long-term productivity growth to within the range of 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent.
Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton argues AI is not just another technology.
“It is becoming a factor of production in its own right, amplifying the value of labour and capital and reshaping how economies create prosperity,” he told this newspaper the other day.
Charlton is confident that unlike the mining boom, which peaked and receded, the benefits of AI will be greater, as long as businesses adopt and change their processes. “AI productivity gains compound: at a point a year, AI exceeds the mining boom’s entire effect inside a decade and keeps going,” he said.
Still, trade barriers and an increasingly fraught geoeconomic situation remain key risks.
According to Treasury, “there is also a realistic downside scenario in which the pace of AI innovation and diffusion are weak, and offsetting structural headwinds keep productivity growth around its current underlying rate (0.5 per cent to 0.8 per cent)”.
Many workers fear AI will replace them. So far, this is not happening at scale, although there are competing views in the academic literature about what the technology will eventually do to employment. The IGR is sanguine on jobs: “While there is not yet evidence of significant labour market impacts, it is expected that productivity gains will arise from some tasks being automated using AI, and that demand for labour will increase and change in other areas.”
All the while, the biggest build gathers pace and grows in size. According to Westpac senior economist Pat Bustamante, around half the $175bn data centre investment pipeline will ultimately translate into higher domestic activity. Almost two-thirds will occur over the next three years.

Cue an image for which no human hand is credited: There are competing views in the academic literature about what the technology will eventually do to employment.



Snappy Tom tried on an economic analysis for size:

While Bustamante sees parallels with the liquefied natural gas boom of the 2010s, local impacts are likely to be front-loaded, reflecting shorter construction timelines, slightly lower overall import leakage and a significant second wave of investment in renewables (which could add an additional $50bn to the investment pipeline).
The long-run economic value of data centres, he wrote in a research note this week, “will depend on the extent to which Australia can translate that compute capacity into AI adoption, productivity growth and, potentially, exports of digital and computing services”.
But there’s a sting. The global AI boom is stretching supply capacity, bidding up the cost of labour, materials, computer chips and capital itself. It’s hampering attempts by central bankers to reduce damaging inflation, which Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock acknowledged on Friday.
There’s also the battle for social licence in communities hosting the sheds producing the “compute”, while devouring resources to power and cool its voracious kit.
On Friday, the Prime Minister’s department circulated a discussion paper for community input over coming weeks to create mandatory national standards for how data centres use energy, water and land, and how AI training can support local skills and industry development.
Labor is also trying to find a compromise on copyright protection between creatives and the hard-charging frontier model developers. This week OpenAI proclaimed it would not consider investing in local AI training or renewable energy if Canberra refused to water down copyright laws.
Right now, the talk around the emerging technology has limitless contours, for good and ill. Another assumption from the IGR boffins, unsaid of course, is AI won’t be wiping out humanity.

What was that? Sheesh, the pond had another 'toon standing by ...



Sorry, the pond was still deep in prayer, as the reptiles flung in a comical Albo snap, as is there wont, this time doing a Joe Biden impression: Anthony Albanese wants to keep the AI boom going without the growing pains. Picture: John Feder



Snappy Tom decided to duck the bromancer solution, perhaps because he recognised he was working on a screen ...

This civilisational dread bobs up from time to time but has been given impetus because of recent warnings from the software engineers of human souls inside this digital blob. Between peril and promise, the Albanese government has landed at optimism, with the ginormous caveat: “if we get this right”. Like most governments, it is trying to get ahead of the game on AI through guardrails and by taking a more active role in attracting investment.
To date, Labor has scandalously dithered on migration and regressed on workplace regulation and industry bailouts. The AI shock, for that is what it is, looks like the mother of all policy tests.
In this rare moment of opportunity, we should keep our eyes open to the mounting risks while being vigilant in not getting ahead of ourselves, as some are prone to do, by simply assuming prosperity is our forever home.

Sheesh, is that all? Be vigilant, be aware of risks, try to shove a bit of that genie back in the bottle?

Back to the clap happy prayer fest ...

And so to a topic which should really have been the bromancer's turf, and for this the pond needed a mood-setting 'toon ...



Full throttled madness, and who wouldn't want to be a part of it? Except perhaps for MSNOW and CNN and other traitors ...

Come on down Lavina, let's get it on with Don ...



The header: Lavina Lee
AUKUS isn’t a mistake, it’s a strategic necessity

That promise of an automated voice:

Listen to this article
8 min

The caption for a wander back in time: Former leaders of the UK, Australia and the US, from left, Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison and Joe Biden in 2021. Picture: Adam Taylor/PMO

Why, the pond wondered, did that snap wander down memory lane, to the dire days of SloMo and Boris and Joe?

It was an anniversary, but it also avoided dealing with a more immediate reality ...

More U.S. troops have died amid Iran war than Pentagon has disclosed publicly
Officials who spoke with The Post expressed frustration that the additional loss of life in the Middle East is not reflected in the Defense Department’s casualty database. (WaPo still makes the archive).




Would anyone trust this mob to organise a picnic, let alone a war?



Lavina lives in hope ...

This past Tuesday marked five years since Scott Morrison, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden stood together to launch the AUKUS trilateral security partnership – a pact that has survived a change of government in every one of the three founding nations.
One common prediction was that Donald Trump would kill it. His administration did perform a review of AUKUS before declaring it was “full steam ahead”.
Critics of the agreement remain. Ironically, the loudest objections seem to be within Australia. These objections fall into two main categories. The first is focused on the cost of the nuclear submarine component of the agreement and its knock-on effects. The second set of objections is more serious. It is that AUKUS was and remains strategically misconceived.
These two objections are not unrelated as any strategy is only as credible as the funding behind it. But for the purpose here, we’ll give this and future governments the benefit of the doubt that they will meet the spending required to deliver AUKUS and build the broader defence capability we need.
What about the more damn­ing argument that AUKUS is strategically misconceived? A strong case can be made that it is not. These are the general arguments against the agreement. First, there are those who argue that AUKUS is designed in response to an adversary – China – that poses no direct or near-term military threat to Australia. Paul Keating has emphasised that China has not threatened Australia militarily and lacks the intention to ever invade.

Ah, never mind the French clock devotee, we're back to the war with China by Xmas. 

The spirit of the bromancer is not lost, even as he spends his time praying for the return of the fountain pen, and perhaps a chance for naughty boys to dip pigtails in ink well ... DF-26 missiles in a military parade in Beijing. Picture: Xinhua/Cha Chunming via Getty Images



On with the fear-mongering, and the need for entirely useless subs, even as Ukraine shows that the days of fighting conventional old-fashioned wars have bumped into a drone revolution:

Regardless of intent, others question China’s capacity to invade Australia. The People’s Liberation Army Navy may have deployed a naval task group to circumnavigate Australia in February 2025. But that is a long way from acquiring the naval power projection capabilities to threaten our territory, with Darwin being 4000km away from China’s Hainan Island naval base.
Let’s deal with intent. For a country that is not facing any threat of invasion, China nevertheless is embarking on the most rapid conventional military build-up since World War II. Its rate of nuclear expansion means it is on track to reach 1000 nuclear warheads by 2030. It possesses the largest navy by number, a theatre missile advantage over the US within the first island chain, and outpaces the US and allied countries on its shipbuilding and production of precision-strike mis­siles. Those who watched China’s September 2025 Victory Day Parade would have seen its display of cutting-edge hardware, from hypersonic “carrier killer” missiles, laser air defence systems, dual-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles, uncrewed vehicles and display of the full nuclear triad.
There is still the issue of defining the threat to our national interests. It is likely China has no desire or need to invade Australia. But this is constructing a strawman argument only to knock it down. Because of our island geography, one does not need to invade Australia to bring it to its knees. Controlling and obstructing our access to vital maritime trade routes would be enough. An undetected nuclear-powered submarine makes it hazardous for Chinese vessels to operate within our approaches. China too has the capability to strike northern Australia with ballistic missiles it could deploy from its artificial island bases or by air.

Quick, another terrifying image: The People's Liberation Army Navy vessel Haiwangxing, a Dongdiao Class auxiliary intelligence ship, sailing off the northwest shelf of Australia. Picture: ADF



Time now for some wondrous logic: an alliance doesn't mean an alliance, it means we have freedom for strategic manoeuvre.

Presumably if a mad king of the Donald kind demands that we jump - as he's done with South Korea - we need only argue about how high ...

This leads to the second strategic objection, which is that AUKUS diminishes our strategic autonomy, forces us to conform passively to US policy and interest, and commits us to a US war against China.
The structure and distribution of power in our region and the world is increasingly hierarchical. For a country with a relatively small population, large landmass and an economy one-tenth the size of China’s, an alliance with a great power and agreements such as AUKUS are not a luxury. All this gives us far more relevance and freedom of strategic manoeuvre than we would have otherwise.
Besides, it is obvious that deterring China from using force to achieve its territorial ambitions in the region is not only in the American interest but also Australia’s.
Even if we sat it out, Australia would be profoundly affected by any major-power war in our region. Which means there is no option but to raise deterrence above every other strategic priority. When China is changing hard power facts on the ground and openly committing to expansionism, deterrence is the only and urgent option.
What difference can a middle power such as Australia make? That’s the line critics of AUKUS like to run. They forget the importance of geostrategy. The US has territories in Guam and Honolulu but remains a distant power. It cannot project power without the use of territory in the region. This is where the growing importance of joint facilities being developed in Western Australia and the Northern Territory under the AUKUS arrangement comes into play.
The more dispersed and developed US and allied military options are in Asia, the more complicated it becomes for the PLA to prevail in various scenarios. It is why China detests AUKUS. The latter creates a challenging geostrategic problem for the PLA.
Keep in mind that a key component of Chinese grand military strategy is to exploit the US difficulty of projecting power from afar into East Asia. The more allies hang back, do less or free-ride, the harder it is for the US to project power and the greater China’s strategic advantage. This is due to the simple mathematics in that there is no balance in Asia without US military power or its ability to combine with allied forces.
There is a third argument based on two key narratives that Beijing deliberately and persistently promotes to the region. This is the argument that when it comes to supposedly core Chinese interests such as Taiwan, the PLA is undeterrable and will pay any price to achieve its objectives. The second related narrative is that the US is in decline, chaotic and unreliable, therefore it is better for countries such as Australia to refrain from entering into reckless agreements such as AUKUS that will lead only to disaster and defeat.

As always, the reptiles turned to an AV distraction, this one bringing in the dog botherer and the swishing Switzer, deep into the war with China:

Next video thumbnail
China’s rise is the world’s true geopolitical threat and must be contained
​Australian columnist Tom Switzer argues that the world's true geopolitical threat is the rise of China.​“I think the big post-Cold War thesis that is going to become more relevant over the next few decades is John Mearsheimer’s ‘The Tragedy of Great Power Politics’,” Mr Switzer told News24 host Chris Kenny.​“This is that China’s rise is really the big geopolitical threat facing our region, potentially the world, and America, as the running hegemon, will go to great lengths to make sure that China is constrained.​“Let's hope he’s right.”



Lavina kept lathering up the hive mind into a right royal panic:

These narratives, which have been internalised by many critics of AUKUS, underline much of the criticism of the agreement in our national debate. The reasoning is circular and unsupported by empirical evidence. It goes like this. China cannot be deterred from using force, will out-escalate its adversaries and therefore inevitably will dominate the region. In contrast, the determination and stakes are not as high for the US, which means it is pointless and perilous for a regional middle power to provoke the future dominant power rather than accommodate it.
Every government and military undertakes a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to the use of force. That it cannot be certain it will prevail with acceptable cost is why China has not yet gone down that path. Deterrence will be successful if these Chinese doubts grow. On US unreliability, it is easy to make this case given the unconventional nature of the current administration in Washington. Yet look at the evidence rather than commentary. Trump’s transactional bargain with Asian allies is this: do and spend more if you want American presence and protection. That’s not unreasonable in the current strategic circumstances.
Despite the focus on Western hemispheric defence in its official documents, these same documents are also clear that preventing China from dominating the first island chain – an imaginary line that runs from Japan and South Korea through Taiwan and Southeast Asia – remains a fundamental strategic objective. Look at the activities and presence of US forces in Japan, The Philippines, and indeed Australia, and it is clear abandonment is not on the cards.

There came an almost billy goat butt, in the form of a "besides":

Besides, it is clear Trump is obsessed about increasing US hard power abroad. AUKUS achieves that for both countries.

He's obsessed about increasing US hard power abroad? What, like Canada and Greenland and Venezuela and Iran and assorted straits? And while deeply mired in Ruski corruption he keeps on giving Vlad the sociopath a free pass? And this set of follies is something we should share in?

The pond was reminded of the frenzy the mad king has produced in normally civil Canucks, with this Dean Blundell Substack outburst ...

It's Over, America: Canada Accepts EU Invite And Mark Carney Just Torched Trump in Front of All of Europe and Canada Is Never Coming Back
Carney accepted the EU’s Invitation as Europe gives Mark Carney a standing ovation. Canada's old life with America is dead for good. Here’s why.

...The man threatening 27 democracies because they want to hang out with Canada is the President of the United States. The man getting the ovation is ours.
So I’m going to say this as clearly as I know how, for every American reading this and every Canadian who still thinks this is a rough patch. It’s over. The old relationship between Canada and the United States is dead. Nobody is coming in 2029 with flowers and an apology to take us back to the way it was. Carney said it himself in the spring of 2025 that the old relationship built on deep economic integration and tight security cooperation was finished. People called it campaign talk. This week Europe threw the wake and gave the eulogy a standing ovation, while Carney disembowelled America’s fascist rapist President without uttering his name once.

Sure, it's rabble rousing, but there's a reason that the rabble has been roused ... 



...and yet Lavina blithely wanders on, sublimely unaware ...

There’s a final point about the character of nations. Materially and technologically, we gain significantly from the alliance and agreements such as AUKUS. It is also about how we see the Australian national character and strategic culture. Local voices loudly warn that America is losing the will to contribute public security goods to the world and is retreating, yet tend to push for a similar insular and cautious Australian outlook. That would be a poor choice.
Lavina Lee is the director of the foreign policy and defence program at the US Studies Centre.

And joining the clown carnival is a good choice?

Let us all pray along with the immortal Rowe ...




And there's a couple more bro-related 'toons ...





Just for Lavina. Tear it all down ...

For decades, we have told ourselves that our country represents democracy, freedom, and free trade. We believed we had allies, like-minded nations that shared these values. We thought we opposed dictators and kleptocrats, the leaders who steal from their own people. What happens when we realize that we no longer do?




Friday, September 18, 2026

In which the pond is shamed by an onion muncher appearance, and Homeric Henry fails to deliver the referential goods ...

 

What's the greater shame? That the reptiles should feature the onion muncher or that the pond should waste time on him?

The pond suspects the latter. The reptiles are gunna do what reptiles do, but the pond has no excuse for its wretched, sordid behaviour.



The header: By Tony Abbott
The ‘frontier wars’ don’t belong in the Australian War Memorial

The invitation: Listen to this article
7 min

Listen to an automated voice for 7 minutes? 

The pond will stop its ears against the AI song...

The caption? Proof that a war did exist: ST Gill’s Attack on Store Dray, 1865, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

It's just another form of black bashing, but it's the logic that gets to the pond:

Because it commemorates the service and sacrifice of the men and women who have fought for our country, the Australian War Memorial is our greatest national monument and shrine. It was originally conceived by Charles Bean, to honour the men whose exploits he’d described in the official history of the Great War.

Ergo, the noble white warriors that defeated the primitive black hordes (cf Pauline), the Australian War Memorial is the perfect place to celebrate the "service and sacrifice of the men and women who have fought for our country", producing the great and successful invasion which brought the country into being, which introduced the wondrous Anglo-Celtic, Judaeo-Xian tradition to the land, and which wiped out vast numbers of the original occupiers...

Sorry, not sorry ...

What these men did, he wrote, nothing now can alter: “The good, the bad, the greatness and smallness of their story will stand … It rises, as it will always rise, above the mists of ages, a monument to great-hearted men, and for their nation a possession forever.”
That’s been the role of the War Memorial ever since: to chronicle, to mourn, occasionally to admit and to explain, but above all to honour the deeds of the Australian armed forces, of the nation-in-uniform. It’s been intended as a place of unity and pride, rather than division and shame; a place to record and to remember what Australians have done together to defend our commonwealth, to support our allies, and to uphold our values. It’s never been intended as a place to note, other than perhaps in passing, the fights of some Australians against other Australians; and even then, say with the conscription debates, only in the context of our military campaigns.

But were they Australians? Weren't they just primitive blacks of no distinction whatsoever, singularly incapable of mounting a decent campaign up against dinkum military invaders bringing great joy to the land? (cf Pauline).

Didn't they deserve to be vanquished from the land with vigorous military actions and supporting settler guerrilla colonial campaigns so that the Anglo-Celtics might seize the country? (cf Pauline, cf Gaza)

A distracting snap: Charles Bean, official war historian, 1921. Picture: Australian War Memorial



It says something about the current management of the Australian War Memorial that they invited this charlatan to deliver this claptrap, but they did.

Perhaps it was an attempt to exorcise the deep shame of the behaviour of the invaders, but don't expect any shame from the shameless onion muncher, deploying "scare" "quotes" like that was a hands down way of winning an argument ...

That’s why the current campaign to make the so-called “frontier wars” a key element of the expanded and revamped Memorial is so misconceived. If the undoubted bloodshed between settlers and tribespeople is to be included, because the critics of colonialism now choose to characterise much of our history as a “war” between the British Empire and “First Nations”, what about the fights between “First Nations”, which were frequent and often deadly? How could events such as the Eureka Stockade or even the apprehension of the Kelly Gang be excluded, as at least they involved official direction, in a “war memorial” that would then have evolved from honouring our soldiers to eroding our conception of the nation for which they fought?
Recent claims that the “Australian wars” of the 19th century could have killed up to 100,000 Aboriginal people, largely based on projections and assumptions about the bloody work of the Queensland native mounted police, are entirely speculative.
Even the Newcastle University Massacre Map puts the Aboriginal death toll at about 11,000, from some 400 massacres around the country. And because this figure is often derived from subsequent oral history, it’s best described as a guesstimate – although that’s not to minimise the bloodshed that took place, such as around Bathurst, in Gippsland, western Victoria, the Kimberleys, outback Queensland, and particularly in Tasmania.
In the 1820s, Tasmania endured what were described, even then, as the “Black Wars”, with frequent attacks on isolated shepherds and homesteads, culminating in a declaration of martial law and the “black line”, where some 2000 soldiers and settlers attempted to corral the resistance.
Historian Henry Reynolds says that the martial law declaration plus the scale of settler casualties (almost 200 dead in a population of scarcely 20,000; with perhaps three times as many Aboriginal deaths) justifies it being called a war. On the other hand, benign interactions continued, with widow Sarah Birch intervening on at least two occasions to save the warrior Kickerterpoller from prison or execution. And governor George Arthur, along with most of the citizens of Hobart, received the remaining warriors with honour after the eventual truce.

Numbers? Numbers is the way to deny the black wars and black resistance?

At this very moment, the mad King is conducting a war with Iran, in which just there have been a mere confirmed US military forces deaths of 18, and perhaps 750 wounded. It's possibly all lies, and it's possible that thousands of Iranian civilians have died, but you don't have to do a body count to arrive at a war, cf the phoney war of 1939-40

Another distraction: Fish catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour c.1813. Painting: John William Lewin


Marvel at the ways of an apologist for the killing fields:

If the undoubted violence of those much harsher times really constituted a war between two peoples, it’s hard to explain the eagerness of Aboriginal men to join their fellow Australians in the First AIF. At least a thousand Aboriginal men talked their way past racial bans on recruitment, with up to 30 of them decorated for valour. Hundreds were killed in action, including a son of 1930s activist William Cooper, who cited these deaths for king and country in his bid for Aboriginal people’s full civic rights.
It’s this Aboriginal contribution to Australia’s military campaigns, well before official discrimination ended, that has long been remembered and justly celebrated at the Australian War Memorial.
Of course, it has to be accepted that we let ourselves down as a country, and betray our best ideals, when we fail to confront the whole story of our past.
For instance, even though the subject matter of the Brereton Report is far from the whole story of our Afghanistan campaign, however contested, it is a part of it. So that’s a possible blot on our honour as a nation that can’t be ignored, even in a place dedicated to the ideals of duty, service and sacrifice.
And yes, for too long, the bloodstained frontier was amnesed from our history, in what WEH Stanner called the “great Australian silence”. Yet official goodwill dated from the very start of settlement, with governor Arthur Phillip enjoined by the British government to “live in amity” with the native peoples. When speared at Manly Cove while searching for Bennelong, he put it down to a misunderstanding and refrained from the show of punitive force that might have been expected at that time.
Then there were the explorers who could not have traversed territory unseen by British eyes without Aboriginal guides, the settlers who could not have farmed without Aboriginal help, and all the Australians from mission times to these who’ve dedicated their lives to Aboriginal advancement, that make any modern re-characterisation of our history as one of invasion and near genocide a wild pendulum swing too far.

Another visual distraction: Historian Henry Reynolds in his office at his home in Richmond, Tasmania.



For a moment the onion muncher argued against himself:

Of course, Tasmanian resistance leader Tongerlongeter is no less a part of our national story than Simpson with his donkey, and we should admire the spirit with which he defended a doomed way of life. No less than the Anzacs, he belongs to all Australians, whether their ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years, or whether they’ve just emerged from their citizenship ceremony. The only question is: Where should it be enshrined?

Ah, a cunning deflection, an attempt to erase the guilt.

The solution: move it somewhere else, anywhere else.

What a noble tradition that is. Move the blacks to encampments, move them to remote areas, move them to a portable across the oval so other students wouldn't know they existed (oh Tamworth).

You can't keep the stupid down ...

Given that none of the participants in any “frontier war” had Australian uniforms or the authorisation of an Australian government, the place to recall and to regret might be at the Australian National Museum, or perhaps at a new wing of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at the ANU as Reynolds suggested recently, but it’s not here at the Australian War Memorial
Tony Abbott served as Australia’s 28th prime minister. He is the author of Australia: A History (HarperCollins, 2025) This is a condensed version of a speech he delivered at the Australian War Memorial on Friday.

In Tasmania alone, the black wars had the authorisation of the British government, and its specious to propose that simply because the commonwealth didn't come into being until January 1901 that prior governments weren't "Australian" ...nor should it be discounted because  some of the military campaigns were a glorious failure ...

In November 1828 Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur declared martial law across the settled districts. It stayed in force until 1832. In practice it meant a settler could shoot an Aboriginal person without answering for it.
In October 1830, Arthur put roughly 2,200 soldiers, settlers and convicts into a human chain across the settled districts and marched it south east, intending to drive the remaining Oyster Bay and Big River people onto the Tasman Peninsula and hold them there.
It ran for seven weeks. It captured two people, a man and a boy. Everyone else walked through the line at night. (here)

It's to the eternal disgrace of the AWM that they should have pandered to this deeply stupid man, and the pond shares their disgrace ...

Meanwhile, the black wars continued atop the lizard Oz...

EXCLUSIVE
Agency delivers boy from kindy to meth den, via text
WA child protection officials removed a four-year-old Indigenous boy from his grandparents – his only carers since birth – via a text message and placed him with his meth-addicted mother.
By Ros Thomas

At this point the pond should note that the reptiles have introduced a mildly different format, part of which seems aimed at spoofing the intermittent archive.

So the pond can only note the current reptile jihads, offering the url in the hope that the archive will come good, as it often does ...

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation%2Findigenous%2Findigenous-boy-taken-from-grandparent-carers-with-while-at-kindy-by-text%2Fnews-story%2Fb526b3bd2feb6885ceabcc61118ec9bd

There were other familiar jihads ...

Migration policy is ripe for reform; all we got were tweaks
A quiet, managerial response to one of the defining political issues of the era is likely to do little to win hearts and minds.
By Lachlan Vass

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fmigration-policy-is-ripe-for-reform-all-we-got-were-tweaks%2Fnews-story%2Fb9883bd097acd9e8ac0bedd97bfc2109

Maintain the bigotry ...

...A review of regional migration settings has also been under way since June 2024. Regional visa holders tend to live in capital cities and earn less than other skilled migrants. This is another area that appears ripe for reform, though two years later we’re still waiting.
Migration policy isn’t easy. There are difficult trade-offs to be made, and vested interests to be overcome. We should beware those who sell easy solutions. However, the government’s policies announced on Thursday are closer to procedural tweaks than systemic reform.
Lachlan Vass is research manager at e61 Institute.

The pond only inserts that closing note so it could pay tribute to the immortal Rowe (and assure correspondents they weren't missing much)...



And for a site now showing it's littered with AI, this came as an irony ...

How Iran recruited AI for surveillance and propaganda
Iran’s propaganda operators have invoked an ‘explanatory jihad’, treating propaganda as a religious and strategic duty.
By Rana Dadpour

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fhow-iran-recruited-ai-for-surveillance-and-propaganda%2Fnews-story%2F4f85722d459de46b71e41e9fb4e8673e

...This gives Australia’s AI debate a concrete question: How do we protect people when a foreign state can use these tools to identify its critics, map their relationships and reach into the lives they built here?
Anthropic acknowledges that its safeguards allowed some surveillance-related software development. Australia’s AI Safety Institute should therefore work with providers to test whether safeguards can recognise a wider purpose across related requests, without making intrusive monitoring of ordinary users a condition of safety. According to Anthropic, one state organisation in Iran claimed to have surveilled and profiled 6388 Iranians in a year. The company then banned 16 accounts linked to the operation.
But closing accounts does not erase collected information or disable tools already developed. People entered in security databases may never know what information has been collected about them, who can access it or how it will be used. Providers and democratic governments should measure their response partly by the protection those exposed to AI-assisted surveillance receive, including confidential reporting and practical specialist support.
For people facing repression, AI safety is bound up with whether they can speak, organise and trust one another without exposing themselves or their families to danger. Keeping AI under human control is therefore an incomplete ambition unless we also ask whose control it strengthens, and what protection people have when that power is used against them.
Rana Dadpour is a research fellow at James Cook University. She came to Australia from Iran in 2012.

Never mind, Skynet will kill us all within the decade.

As noted above, it seems that the reptiles are so alarmed by illiteracy that they now must insist on providing the hive mind with the opportunity to listen rather than to read:



The header: By Henry Ergas
Don’t blame the curriculum for classroom mediocrity

Just as with the Onion Muncher, Our Henry came with a new automated voice offer:

Listen to this article
8 min

That bloody automated voice is everywhere, Skynet preparing to swoop ...

"Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction? Or the glistening eye to the poison of a reptile smile?"

The caption for the pathetic generic AI slop: “One Australian 15-year-old in two lacks at least one core skill needed to be a productive member of society,” writes Henry Ergas.

It was a great relief to discover that Our Henry wasn't delivering another Zionist diatribe.

But the pond should have been wary at having its wish granted, because there was no chance of being caught in a vortex of Homeric Henry this day (to borrow a phrase).

Instead it was just a bog standard outing on failing education standards (in the pond's recollection they've been failing for sixty years or more, ever since the pond left school), imbued with a deep fear of Asian competition:

In 2012, the Gillard government’s white paper on Australia in the Asian Century declared, as National Objective 9, that “By 2025, Australia will be ranked as a top five country in the world for the performance of our students in reading, science and mathematics literacy”.
Together with the Gonski report, that objective helped justify a spending splurge that, in inflation-adjusted terms, increased public expenditure per student by 24 per cent – 2½ times the increase in per capita GDP.
That the splurge benefited teachers, the teachers unions and our sprawling education bureaucracies is beyond doubt. But the results of PISA 2025 show that it failed miserably to boost Australian students into the uppermost ranks of the education ladder.
Not only did Australia miss the “top five” target in all three subjects; the distance between its scores in mathematics and science and those of the top five more than doubled. But it is not our absence from the medal podium that is truly worrying: it is the catastrophic deterioration in our performance over time.
Since 2015, the declines in our maths and reading scores are, on the OECD’s calculations, each equivalent to losing a year of learning – as if one previously worthwhile year of school were now being entirely wasted. Compared to 2003, the loss is larger still: some two previously worthwhile years of schooling now produce no measurable gain in skills.
We are, moreover, equal opportunity education vandals: just as the performance of our best students fell by more than that of their counterparts across the OECD panel, so did that of our worst. Kneecapping the best students is bad enough; but what has happened to the laggards is surely unconscionable.
The OECD defines a baseline score corresponding to the minimum needed to take part meaningfully in a technologically advanced society. Only half of Australian 15-year-olds clear that very low bar in all three subjects – science, reading and mathematics – compared to nearly 80 per cent in Singapore. Put slightly differently, one Australian 15-year-old in two lacks at least one core skill needed to be a productive member of society.
Predictably, the reaction to those results has been loud calls to reform the curriculum. That there is scope to do so is undeniable, but it is important to be realistic.
For Australia to reach fifth place in the rankings, the scores of Australia’s 15-year-olds would need to improve by about 48 points. However, very few studies of educational reforms find improvements exceeding 20 points, with gains of that magnitude depending on the reforms reaching every child and their effects lasting through to age 15. But even were those gains achievable, most would be spent standing still: the 20 points would merely offset our trend decline of about 16 points a decade in mathematics.
Nor should we assume that the curriculum explains the difference between Australian students and their better-performing counterparts. Japanese secondary students, for example, greatly outperformed Australian students in every international test administered in the late 1960s and early 1970s – a time when rote learning was still a central part of the Japanese curriculum.
The contrast in parental expectations is a crucial part of the explanation. Japanese parents, research conducted in that period showed, were far more demanding than parents in the Anglosphere. Thus, one study found that 40 per cent of American parents thought their children were performing satisfactorily, compared to only 5 per cent of parents in Japan. And unlike American parents, Japanese parents placed twice as much weight on effort as on ability, insisting that their children could and should do better by trying harder.

And yet Japan isn't exactly in a picture perfect state: Japan’s economic comeback faces hardest BOJ test in a generation

At this point the reptiles introduced damning evidence that Our Henry was right ...

Next video thumbnail
‘Kids are not learning’: TV host slams latest classroom dataNews24 host Danica De Giorgio discusses the PISA data on chaos in the classroom. “Chaotic classrooms, digital distraction, truancy … and bullying are now rife,” Ms De Giorgio said. “41 per cent report noise and disorder during lessons, one in three say classmates don’t listen to teachers, and four in 10 are distracted by phones and devices during lessons. “Kids are not learning; they are completely distracted.”


No, not that data. 

That Danica and this wild-eyed loon were talking about education was a damning indictment of the reptiles and the education system ...


 



If they're the best the reptiles can offer, no wonder vulgar youff are off the educational rails.

Then it was back to more paranoia about Asia, and at this point the pond can hear correspondents yowling. 

Where's Homeric Henry, what is this talk of Confucianism? What about the noble traditions of the Anglosphere?

Say what? Confucius was on to the Golden Rule long before Christ?




Was Christ just a disciple, cunning enough to flip that negative into a positive?

The Ancient Greeks, Romans and Persians were in to it too?

Sorry, there's no room for any of that in this deplorably degraded Homeric Henry outing ...

Still today, those differences in the emphasis on achievement are reflected in the investment East Asian parents make in after-hours tutoring. Participation in tutoring is close to universal, covering somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent of students in Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
What participation buys is, in effect, a second school system: by the age at which Korean students sit PISA, they will have spent the equivalent of about 4½ school years being tutored. Moreover, because there is intense competition between tutoring schools, the quality of that instruction is likely to be high.
It is conventional to claim that the greater focus on education in East Asia reflects the legacy of Confucianism. But while that has an element of truth, the far more important factor is that so much is at stake.
To take just one example, in Singapore, an employee in the top 15 per cent of the skill distribution earns 2.6 times as much over a working life as one in the bottom 15 per cent; and that takes no account of better working conditions, greater job security and much higher social standing. In Australia, by contrast, those in the skill ranking’s top 15 per cent earn just 1.5 times as much over a working life as those in the bottom 15 per cent.
Differences in growth rates compound the effects of those differences in the skill premium. Ultimately, an earnings premium is a percentage: its value depends on the earnings to which it applies. Faster growth makes a given percentage premium worth more in dollars; and because acquiring skills requires an outlay now, faster growth lifts the future income stream without altering the upfront cost – which means the investment becomes markedly more attractive.
The effect is anything but trivial: had earnings in Australia kept rising at reform-era rates, the extra lifetime earnings from moving to the top sixth in the skill distribution from the middle of the pack would be about 50 per cent greater than they are today.
That is not to suggest future earnings are all that matters. Rather, the point is that we have done everything we possibly can to reduce the stakes: failure rates are low; just about any school leaving score qualifies for university entrance; and only a minute share of the assistance tertiary students receive depends on academic performance. Meanwhile, the merit principle plays little role in hiring, promotion and dismissal decisions, while high marginal tax rates erode the gains from having superior skills. As if that were not enough, every government policy seems designed to entrench economic stagnation, reducing the return on acquiring skills.
Little wonder, then, that PISA shows astonishingly low levels of aspiration among Australian 15-year-olds. The motivation score of Australian students from non-immigrant backgrounds is less than half that of their US counterparts; and while the scores of students who are first-generation immigrants are significantly higher, they too remain well below the US benchmark.
We are, in short, firmly back at what Keith Hancock, in his masterpiece, Australia (1930), called the worship of the “middling standard”. “Australian democracy,” he famously wrote, “is properly anxious that everybody should run a fair race. It is improperly resentful if anybody runs a fast race. Indeed, it dislikes altogether the idea of a race, for in a race victory is to the strong. Its solicitude is for the weak, and its instinct is to make merit take a place in the queue.”
No amount of spending on schools or tinkering with the curriculum can cure that malady. It is not an unfortunate error; it is mediocrity by design.

Just a single reference to a 1930 text, and that one by Keith Hancock! An author who bored the pond way back when. At least Manning Clark offered an apocalyptic vision.

And that proves the pond's point.

Where are all the pompous, portentous references of yore? 

All the more urgently needed in a diatribe about the the failings of the education system and vulgar youff. They could have all done with some dinkum ancient Greek and Roman larnin' ...

The pond regrets that this Homeric Henry outing only deserves a D-.

Not so the infallible Pope and the immortal Rowe, who always wins top marks ...





And now, as there are more signs every day of AI infesting the hive mind, this ...




Thursday, September 17, 2026

In which not a single reptile jihadist gets extended pond consideration. Thursday blues strike again!

 

Sheesh, you hand pick flunkeys for the Supreme Court and they perform a minor act of defiance, you hand pick a central banker as a lackey and he presides over an interest rate rise. What's the point of being a king?

It's a bit like that prize doofus Ed Sheeran picking a supporter of rights for Palestinians as a supporting act, and then being startled when he actually says what he believes.

Luckily none of that sort of heretical behaviour ever ruffles the thick reptile hides roaming the lizard Oz.

But you have to admire them for their relentless invention.

When it comes to mounting jihads, the reptiles are true devotees of Murdochian tabloid art.



As always on a Thursday the pond relies on the intermittent archive to do the hard yards ...never mind the bad gateways, be pleased it works in a steampunk way ...

EXCLUSIVE
Indigenous elder’s plea: Take kids from bad parents, this isn’t another Stolen Generation
Doris Eaton says Aboriginal people must start ‘getting tough’ on irresponsible parents or a generation of children will be lost.
By Ros Thomas and Paul Garvey

EXCLUSIVE
Missing PM: Voice campaign leaders push Albanese to end ‘national void’ in Indigenous policy
Former Yes campaign leaders have urged an end to timidness in Indigenous policy.
By Rosie Lewis and Elizabeth Pike

You might think that this is admirable, but this is the mob that ferociously campaigned against the Voice, and now they're giving voice, but only in a way that serves ulterior reptile motives ...

Albanese’s promises are fading fast but kids’ plight remains
Three years after promising to implement the Uluru Statement in full, the Prime Minister stands accused of abandoning First Nations children.
By Geoff Chambers

Just to say it again: some might think this jihad worthy - attention to the Indigenous community - but the breathtakingly obvious real intent is shown by the photo accompany Geoff chambering his standard round ... the eternally glum, downcast Albo, a variation on comical Albo.

What could be even more insulting? Why a play on the Voice, a form of triumphant gloating ...



The reptiles know how this works ... an endless supply of water will wear down the hardest rocks.

Over on the far right the reptiles maintained the rage ...

Desperate Indigenous kids and women need help – not another inquiry
It’s abundantly clear we need a peak body in WA to advocate for Aboriginal child and family safety.
By Hannah McGlade
Contributor

In a way it was a relief. In with the new jihad meant a temporary pause on the old ...



Contributors to the Australian Daily Zionist News worked overtime at a fearsome rate ... and again it might seem driven by noble impulse, but the real intent - nothing to be said about ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank - shines through by way of relentless absence ...

Murky fears and terrors infested the hive mind ...

Four ‘major’ terror plots since Bondi attack – but public kept in the dark
Five people, including three teens, have been charged over major terrorism plots since Bondi – yet details remain hidden from the Australian public.
By Ben Packham and James Dowling

Why the scare quotes around 'major'? These were a couple of the 'major' threats...

• Two boys, aged 15 and 16, ­arrested in the NSW town of Moree in April, who allegedly accessed extremist material online;
• A 13-year-old NSW boy ­arrested in April for allegedly making a document connected with terrorism and possessing ­violent extremist material;

Guilty as charged muh lud. 

Each day the pond accesses the lizard Oz extremist material online, and then disseminates it to fragile minds.

Then there was the relentless harking back ...



EXCLUSIVE
How Bondi attack sparked drive for child trauma unit
Bondi shooting doctors prompt new NSW trauma institute to prepare for future disasters
Doctors who treated Bondi terror victims have prompted the NSW government to establish a $500,000 paediatric trauma institute to prepare for future mass casualty events.
By Lachlan Leeming

EXCLUSIVE
‘Everyone was devastated. Absolutely everyone
The fight for Bondi's youngest victim: doctor's speak for the first time
Inside Sydney Children’s Hospital on the night of the Bondi terror attack — medicos speak for the first time about the fight for Matilda.
By Elizabeth Colman

Dressed as worthy, but don't ever expect a similar story about the plight of children in Gaza.

Over on the far right the echo machine continued apace ...

Healthcare is still waiting for its antisemitism reckoning
A royal omission: healthcare is still waiting for its antisemitism reckoning
The Royal Commission has been too caught up in the impacts of antisemitism, instead of its perpetrators.
By Jacqueline Rakov

The real intent and purpose of the coverage? 

That was left to a Pom blow in.

No coverage of the ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza, just a mocking of those who might care.

Free Palestine? No, free us from sanctimonious keffiyeh wearers
You pay $200 for a ticket to see your favourite UK crooner. Next thing a smug Yank rapper is lecturing you about war. When do we get a break from the ‘Gazaholics’?
By Brendan O'Neill

The pond wondered if it should enable and pander to O'Neill, an intensely dislikable blow in, and decided that a teaser trailer was more than enough, and in the form of a screen cap so that his execrable ranting wouldn't be available to the AI that keeps looting the pond. Go loot the reptiles ...



All of Sheeran's supporting acts had more guts than him, but at least that provided the pond with a chance to feature the immortal Rowe ...



Why is it that there's always more wit and meaning in a 'toon than in torrents of reptile verbiage?

After all that winnowing, early in the morning the pond was left with just Jack the Insider at the top of the page ...

Art of the faux political apology in three easy steps
From Anthony Albanese’s podcast blunders to Pauline Hanson’s ‘primitives’ outrage, Australia’s leaders are stretching single-day missteps into fortnight-long crises.
By Jack the Insider

Jack performed a typical reptile ploy - comparing the ranga warrior to Albo in the matter of apologies, leading him to eventually arrive at the punchline: Hastie sounds quite prime ministerial, doesn’t he?

Poor old beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way.

Somebody who woke at the same time as the pond might squawk that the pond missed one story ...

EXPLOSIVE ROW
Bombshell claims Charles raged at Diana’s brother in funeral clash
Nearly 30 years after the world wept for Princess Diana, her brother has revealed the words King Charles allegedly said when no one was watching.
By Jacquelin Magnay

Explosive? More dangerous extremist material?

Relax, it's just a book promo in disguise ...

...According to Earl Spencer, Charles “went nuts” after being reminded he had been aged 30 at the time of Lord Mountbatten’s funeral back in 1979.
“Prince Charles continued his stream of anger, without me interrupting. Then he stopped,” writes Earl Spencer.
“I assumed the pause signalled an effort to bring himself under control, but then he unleashed down the phone what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death. “Rest assured,” he hissed, “we’ll forget her soon enough!”
Earl Spencer had discussed the issue on the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death in 2017, telling the BBC it was a “very bizarre and cruel thing” for Diana’s sons to walk behind her coffin.
He told officials of his objection, but said: “Eventually I was lied to and told they (William and Harry) wanted to do it, which of course they didn’t, but I didn’t realise that.” He said the experience was harrowing and horrifying.
In the funeral eulogy Earl Spencer promised to protect William and Harry from the royal system, and said that their “blood family” would protect them.
The launch of the book on September 22 will reignite tensions between the Royal Family and the Spencers, which have simmered for decades. Harry in particular is close to Earl Spencer, while William’s relationship has been more private.

How the pond yearned to be back with a marinating Hydeing ...

Memo to King Charles: you can’t stop the Sussexes’ reality show bandwagon. You only spice up the script

Once again, it has been a lively week for the Real Housewives of Windsor franchise, with Harry and Meghan back in the UK for precisely 12 days before the king fired out a letter via the lord chamberlain on Monday, reminding viewers that the Sussexes are “private citizens” and not to treat them as working royals. You have to say the producers on this unscripted reality show are truly at the top of their game with these targeted provocations. Harry and Meghan duly took the bait and issued an intemperately hurt rejoinder – but we’ll get to that in a bit.
First, let’s deal with King Charles’s missive to “relevant senior stakeholders across government, the military and Lord Lieutenancies”. Ugh. Not to be too aesthetically sensitive, but I think we can all live without the sovereign being reduced to the ghastly language of “relevant senior stakeholders”. What next? Seeking “buy-in” for ribbon-cutting events and referring to posies as “high levels of audience engagement”? It does all rather reinforce the idea that the Windsors’ cringe-makingly self-styled “the firm” really is some dreary mid-range company with a wan Meet Our Team page on its website, in which Prince William – carefully photographed without a tie – explains that he “enjoys long walks with the dog and is a passionate Aston Villa supporter”.

And so on, and the pond was mortified and wept that it should be forced into noting the activities of the royals and the not so royals ...

Meanwhile, in alternative reality world? 

Sorry, for that you must go elsewhere ...

If Netanyahu Isn't a Far-right Fanatic, Why Does He Behave Like One?

Something is different lately about the world's reaction to Israeli abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank. In recent weeks, a fresh wave of sanctions against Israel and an angry U.S. government make the whole thing look bad for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Attacks on Palestinians or their property are now happening at a rate over four times higher than in 2021, according to the UN. The U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has been referring to the Israeli perpetrators as terrorists. Occasional ersatz investigation of these incidents won't change those positions, and none of this is helping Netanyahu ahead of the elections.
His relationship with the Trump administration was already tense due to the regional geopolitics, and no dazzling presidential visit or boost seems to be in the works now. So why isn't Netanyahu doing something, at the very least cracking down seriously on settler violence? The popular wisdom is that Netanyahu is beholden to his extremist and expansionist coalition partners. In this view, Netanyahu himself has no real ideological commitment to all this fanaticism and would have been pragmatic if it served him politically – or he could still be in the future.
But now more than ever, there are no more reasons left to believe this weird impression. For those of us who aren't privy to Netanyahu's inner thoughts, we now have a great opportunity for an ideological X-ray. Israel is at the cusp of elections. If Netanyahu desperately needed to keep his fanatical right-wing coalition partners satisfied for the last four years because he was out of political options – no coalition threat to topple the government matters now.
So how are we to explain any number of recent Netanyahu activities that look purely like coalition-expedient pandering to far-right ideologies of Israeli society?

And so on, and you won't find the likes of O'Neill or any other reptile in the hive mind contemplating such awkward matters ...

At this point correspondents might protest at the pond's refusal to engage with the lizard Oz's offerings this day.

No petulant Peta?

She was MIA at time of writing, and anyway the pond always sends her to the cornfield.

That's the way it goes on a dismal reptile Thursday ...

If you ventured inside the fold you might land on this tragic form of boosterism ...

Why Australia should engage with Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi on Iran
With almost 100,000 Iranian-Australians and a broken diplomatic relationship with Tehran, the Coalition has taken an unprecedented step.
By Reza Arab and Saeed Ghasseminejad

The pond would rather point to another place ...

I’ll get death threats for saying it – but this prince is no messiah
Kylie Moore-Gilbert
Political scientist and writer

I’ll probably receive death threats because of this column. This has long been the reality faced by dissidents and activists who speak out against one of the bloodiest and most despotic regimes in the world, the Islamic Republic of Iran. But in recent years, it has also become routine for anyone who questions the growing cult of personality which has formed around the son of Iran’s last Shah, Reza Pahlavi.
As an informed observer of Iranian politics, I was interested to learn that the Coalition this month invited Pahlavi to visit Australia. While Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Ted O’Brien wisely emphasised that it’s “not for Australia to determine who should lead Iran or what form its future government should take,” some of his colleagues were less diplomatic.
Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg gave an interview proclaiming that the Islamic Republic won’t be removed from power “unless we engage seriously with an alternative, and the alternative that we have as a transitional figure is the crown prince”. The Coalition, he added, considers “meeting with the crown prince is one of the most important foreign policy objectives that we have”. That sounds like a tacit endorsement to me.
Pahlavi’s father, Mohammad Reza Shah, was installed to the throne by the US and Britain in 1953 to protect their oil interests after the nationalisation of the country’s oil industry. The Shah was overthrown by the Iranian revolution in 1979, which led to the installation of Iran’s current, hardline regime. His son seemingly also hopes to gain power via a foreign military intervention which has caused ordinary Iranians immense deprivation and suffering.
Liberal MP Julian Leeser then drew an extraordinary parallel between Pahlavi and anti-Apartheid campaigners Desmond Tutu and Winnie Mandela and East Timorese independence leaders Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta. Pahlavi by his own admission has never held a salaried job and has spent his life trying to wind back the 1979 revolution from his multi-million dollar mansion in Maryland. He hasn’t set foot in Iran for almost 50 years.
Reza Pahlavi is to Desmond Tutu what Prince Harry is to clearing landmines in Africa. Admirable in attracting attention to a worthy cause, no doubt. However, Iranians arguably owe far more to those leaders inside the country who have paid a heavy price for their activism yet lack the dynastical wealth and international profile enjoyed by the son of the former Shah. Leaders which Pahlavi’s inner circle has worked assiduously to discredit.
Detailed investigations published by The Atlantic (and later, Reuters) revealed that Pahlavi’s senior advisers view “crushing the opposition … as important as fighting the regime” and that they “routinely threaten and insult anyone who is not entirely loyal to the man they see as a future king”. Targets include prominent opposition figures like Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, Nasrin Sotoudeh, Hossein Ronaghi and Toomaj Salehi, all of whom have spent considerable time in prison and have shown immense bravery in standing up to the Islamic Republic while refusing to flee into exile.
Reza Pahlavi does certainly enjoy a large following in the diaspora, bolstered by sophisticated and coordinated online campaigns. While much of this is genuine, some of it has been manufactured. In 2025 the Haaretz newspaper exposed an “Israeli Influence Operation Aiming to Install Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran,” while BBC Monitoring identified a pattern of “inauthentic online accounts that have helped shape a wider impression of grassroots backing”.
The Netanyahu government has been unashamedly pushing Pahlavi as leader-in-waiting, particularly after a heavily publicised visit to Israel in 2023. Intriguingly, the US administration has withheld its backing, with Trump rebuffing multiple overtures and expressing doubts over the strength of Pahlavi’s support inside Iran. This comes in spite of his supporters’ efforts to explicitly align Pahlavi’s movement with MAGA, including rebranding as “MIGA” (Make Iran Great Again) and enthusiastically cheering on the current US war on Iran.
Pahlavi’s support for airstrikes on his homeland following January’s massacre of unarmed protesters, many of whom took to the streets in response to Pahlavi’s urging, has raised questions about his fitness to lead.
There are also concerns about the democratic transition plan Reza Pahlavi has presented. In it, he grants himself almost two years of near-absolute authority where he alone will appoint a transitional government and serve as commander-in-chief of Iran’s armed forces. Many fear that Pahlavi, like Iranian Revolution leader Ayatollah Khomeini before him, might promise pluralism and consultation only to consolidate power under himself. Such moves are, after all, something of a family tradition.

And so on, and see the original for links ...The Atlantic is particularly worth a read ...

The Iranian Royalists’ Thuggish Edge
MAGA-style tactics and hardball advisers have raised Reza Pahlavi’s profile and divided his potential followers.
By Robert F. Worth (*intermittent archive link)




You have to leave the hive mind to get a sense of the hive mind.

Mein Gott was also a presence inside the fold ...

The ‘bank of mum and dad’ is changing the housing game
Australia’s property market crisis forcing parents to house adult kids
The ‘bank of mum and dad’ has shifted from guaranteeing mortgages to housing adult children full-time, as Australia’s deepening housing crisis shows no sign of easing.
By Robert Gottliebsen
Business Columnist

But the pond lost all heart the moment it spotted the AI/stock shot slop at the start of the piece ...




It's Thursday.

The pond would like to fold its tent and steal into the night, but perforce must face the day, with only the infallible Pope to hand for some light relief ...



That's what passes for light relief?

On second thoughts, it's another gloomy Thursday ... and way past time for AI to destroy the world so that the bots and the logarithms can start again.

So much Ruski money, so much corruption, and never mind the cornball start ...