The pond almost gave up on including the Ughmann this week, but heard a forlorn cry in the distance, "won't someone think of the Ughmann?"
On second thoughts, that was likely delusional, the result of an overdose of the lizard Oz, which can be a bit like licking the skin of a poisonous toad - a brief high from the madness of it all, then terminal brain damage.
There will be no prizes for anyone guessing the topics outlined in this late arvo post.
If nothing else, the Ughmann is supremely predictable ...
Okay, okay, the pond got lazy, and resorted to screen caps, but how else to cope with this sort of bog standard rant?
The pond realises that there might even be some correspondents more anxious to watch thugby leaguers play gladiator and give each other CTE than experience the degenerative condition from reading the Ughmann.
Giving Jimbo a stiff arm to the chops was just the beginning. (*"Stiff arm" is an ancient, Tamworth-approved form of play. Straighten arm, stiffen into cricket bat, swing wildly at opponent's head)
The Ughmann carried on with his litany, his Ginsbergian howl of pain ...
If you traced the Ughmann's pedigree back far enough you'd find a failed seminarian, but does that stop the Ughmann from carrying on like a pork chop?
That's purely a rhetorical question, a bit like wondering if an Ughmann story could ever be run without featuring dark Satanic windmills ...
Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.” “What giants?” asked Sancho Panza. “Those you see over there,” replied his master, “with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length.” “Take care, sir,” cried Sancho. “Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, make energy and keep the lights on, except in the lizard Oz, where they prefer to live with the lights permanently off.”
The pond can't vouch that that's the precise wording in Cervantes' novel, and besides, it turned out that this time it was just a humble power plant of the old-fashioned kind.
Never mind, there was a cute little bot as the next snap, as cute as an AI button ...and relax, the Satanic windmills did come in for a slagging ...
As always, the Ughmann was dead keen on ways to destroy the planet ...
Even as the Ughmann decided we desperately needed to go full AI rogue, the reptiles featured another story about AI going rogue, for a moment top of the digital page ma ...
The pond gets depressed at the monotonous regularity of the Australian Daily Zionist News portion of the lizard Oz, all the more so because prattling Polonius seems determined to become one of its main contributors.
What once was a regular Sunday lark in the park has now become a tedious chore ...
The header: By Gerard Henderson Sydney University vice-chancellor Mark Scott has failed to fight antisemitism
The yearning for a bot reader: Listen to this article 6 min
The caption for the snap of a man looking downcast at the thought crime of having agitated Polonius: Mark Scott, vice-chancellor and president of the University of Sydney. Picture: NewsWire / Josie Hayden
The plaintive plea to ignore the paywall: Make us preferred on Google
The pond only went there because it allowed the pond to do its usual and detour to a Haaretz story ... but first a little of the moaning and whining, and a warning - full disrespect Sharri will make an appearance.
The term failing upwards appears to have become something of a cliche of late. Even so, it is rare indeed that any successful and well-remunerated individual acknowledges that they have failed. Enter Mark Scott, who earns more than $1m a year as the vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney. He is a former head of the NSW Department of Education, a former managing director and editor-in-chief of the ABC and a former director of John Fairfax Holdings Limited, sometimes referred to as Fairfax Media (but no longer with us). It is a matter of record that antisemitism was rife on Australian university campuses after the Hamas terrorist attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, that led to Israel’s defensive war in Gaza. At some universities Jewish students were abused and intimidated, invariably by supporters of radical Islam and the radical left who set up encampments on university campuses. It’s a dangerous unity ticket. The report of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, headed by Virginia Bell, will be handed down in late December. Its findings and recommendations are awaited with interest. But already Scott has acknowledged that he failed to address antisemitism on the campus he is paid to manage. Appearing before a Senate inquiry on September 20, 2024, Coalition senator Sarah Henderson put it to Professor Scott (as he has become) that he had failed Jewish students and staff at the university. Scott replied: “Yes I have failed them and the university has failed them and that’s why we’ve made significant changes to our policy settings.” It’s not clear what Scott meant by saying he had failed Jewish students and Sydney University had failed them as well. After all, he is the vice-chancellor and, as such, in charge of the university’s policies and practices. It might be expected that someone in a very senior position in a university who admitted to having failed with respect to the health and safety of staff and students would offer their resignation. Not Scott who, as reported on these pages on May 31, 2025, received a pay increase of $150,000. Just as well for the taxpayer-subsidised university that he did not regard himself succeeding in his role. Scott used the F-word again when he appeared before the royal commission on July 15 this year. He also conceded, as he had at the Senate hearing, that he had negotiated the removal of the encampment with the Sydney University Muslim Students Association without consulting Jewish students or staff.
All this from a pompous pedant, done in a way that makes Polonius seem in the grip of an unhealthy jealousy, what with him seeming to have spent his career failing downwards.
Then came Sharri: News24 host Sharri Markson and Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin pictured at Bondi. Picture: Rohan Kelly
Okay, enough of that, it's time for the pond to detour off into a Haaretz story.
There's an idiomatic Hebrew phrase, "we've been in this film before" – close to the English expression "we've been here before," or we know what this situation means. The phrase is the best way to capture the meaning of President Isaac Herzog's surprise pardon of Elor Azaria on the eve of Yom Kippur. Azaria was convicted of manslaughter in 2017 by an Israeli military court for executing a wounded Palestinian attacker point-blank, long after soldiers had shot and fully incapacitated the man. It is particularly ironic to process this pardoning of a soldier who killed a wounded man in light of the sweeping fury in Israel over the film "NAZA." For two weeks, Israelis have emitted hellfire commentary, threatened unprecedented de-patriating and death against the filmmakers of the documentary that reveals alleged IDF war crimes in Gaza. And yet when faced with another kind of film about what should have been viewed as a war crime, Israelis never even suggested that the incident was a lie, a fabrication or a blood libel, as per relentless accusations against "NAZA." There was no denial at all of what Azaria had done – only a full-throated embrace that lasted not 25 minutes like the applause for "NAZA" at the Venice Film Festival, but 10 long years, a crescendo ending with the presidential pardon.
There's just time for a screen cap to show off the hero ...
Well you won't be reading any of that any time soon in the lizard Oz ...
Time to get back to Polonius and - dread thought - to Sharri ...
And he promised SUMSA the university would review its investment policies with respect to defence contracts, with Israel as the obvious target. At the royal commission, Scott said he now regretted this as well. In this regard he has become an apology expert. Last Wednesday, Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin addressed The Sydney Institute on the occasion of the publication of their book Bondi Terror: The Tragedy, The Courage, The Aftermath (HarperCollins). Markson referred to the Globalise the Intifada group, which this week ran in the election for the Students Representative Council at Sydney University. The university’s administration clearly did nothing to prevent this. The decision had been criticised by the Chris Minns Labor government and the Kellie Sloane-led opposition in NSW. I was in Israel during the time of the first intifada; it was a violent terrorist attack on Israeli society. The second intifada was even more violent. Markson made it clear that the term “globalise the intifada” was not a political expression and easily could be interpreted as a call to violence against Australians. She reported last Tuesday on her News24 Sharri program that she had drawn Scott’s attention to this. And that the university came back and said it was concerned and that everyone had a right to psychosocial safety – whatever that might mean. But nothing was done. For his part, Ryvchin reported that the previous week at Sydney University, Jewish students who had obtained permission to operate a small stall to mark the Jewish New Year were relocated by campus security to a remote part of the campus for their protection. Why? In Ryvchin’s own words: “Globalise the Intifada activists were scheduled to be in the same area.” He added: “Again the peaceful were displaced to accommodate the violent.”
At this point the reptiles decided on a book promotion, and the pond decided only a screen cap would show off the naked positioning ... Bondi Terror: The tragedy, the courage, the aftermath by Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin
Okay, enough of that prose, glittering with preening smugness and condescension ...how about another chunk of that Haaretz story?
...Netanyahu, ever the weathervane, at first gave anodyne statements about the need to protect IDF values, but quickly shifted to open support for the soldier. On the day Azaria was convicted, Netanyahu announced his support for a pardon; perhaps not coincidentally, a poll by Channel 2 (today Channel 12) that same day found that two-thirds of Israelis supported such a pardon. By later that year, then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who had replaced Ya'alon, also asked then-President Reuven Rivlin for a pardon. The military court had sentenced Azaria to 18 months in prison; then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot reduced it to 14 months, and in the end, he was released after just nine months in jail. To this day, he has expressed no regret for his actions, and the IDF therefore recommended as recently as July that he not be pardoned. Israeli observers, such as Haaretz's Amira Hass, noted back in 2017 that it was only the film that put the incident on the public agenda. Numerous similar acts that were not filmed demonstrated a clear practice of shooting to kill any perpetrator, or even suspect – including before he or she perpetrated any act at all. Netanyahu, ever the weathervane, at first gave anodyne statements about the need to protect IDF values, but quickly shifted to open support for the soldier. On the day Azaria was convicted, Netanyahu announced his support for a pardon; perhaps not coincidentally, a poll by Channel 2 (today Channel 12) that same day found that two-thirds of Israelis supported such a pardon. By later that year, then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who had replaced Ya'alon, also asked then-President Reuven Rivlin for a pardon. The military court had sentenced Azaria to 18 months in prison; then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot reduced it to 14 months, and in the end, he was released after just nine months in jail. To this day, he has expressed no regret for his actions, and the IDF therefore recommended as recently as July that he not be pardoned. Israeli observers, such as Haaretz's Amira Hass, noted back in 2017 that it was only the film that put the incident on the public agenda. Numerous similar acts that were not filmed demonstrated a clear practice of shooting to kill any perpetrator, or even suspect – including before he or she perpetrated any act at all. In other words, being pardoned by the president of Israel is shocking but not surprising. Anyone who was nevertheless shocked that Herzog, a longtime politician from the Labor Party, was the one to do it has been quickly reminded over the last few days that it runs in the family. In 1986, his father Chaim Herzog, Israel's sixth president, approved the unusual preemptive pardon for the Shin Bet agents who not only killed Palestinian bus hijackers after they were captured and bound, but who also participated in an elaborate cover-up in which the agents framed Israel's own military forces, lying shamelessly to their own investigating authorities. Herzog pardoned them before they even stood trial – just as he pardoned or commuted sentences of Jewish civilian terrorists during his term, following their convictions. In the Bus 300 affair, the Supreme Court backed the preemptive pardons for the Shin Bet agents, such that they never even stood trial. The current pardon of Elor Azaria is the latest evidence that Israeli society has long become not only inured but supportive of crimes against Palestinians. Two days ago, a Palestinian killed an Israeli settler on the eve of Yom Kippur at a West Bank spring. At his funeral, settler leader Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria regional council, called to "drain the entire swamp, not just to chase after the mosquito." The language about killing all the mosquitos has been used by Bezalel Smotrich at least as far back as 2018, when I first noticed it. Dagan went on to advocate for a huge military operation against West Bank Palestinians. When that happens, we'll have more "NAZA" films about the collateral damage that looks very not unintended – and more indifference, accusations of lies or outright support. I almost held back about "NAZA," since like most Israelis, I haven't seen it. For over a week, the fact that the film hasn't been released in Israel, even for private viewing by journalists, has grated on my sensibilities. Israel's response has been vicious, but it's also unfair that the public hasn't been given the chance to see it and react substantively. Then I realized that we don't need a new and mysterious documentary to know how Israelis will react to films about the war crimes our country is committing. We've got plenty of such films already.
That distraction almost made Polonius's whining - a double coup for him, the ABC and Zionism - bearable... until the pond came upon those immortal words ... ABC’s lack of viewpoint diversity, which made it a conservative-free zone ...
Read them in context and weep.
That old bumblebee is still buzzing around in the old Polonial noggin ...
At the ABC, the government appoints the board (except for the staff representative) and the board selects the managing director. I had discussions with Scott about the ABC’s lack of viewpoint diversity, which made it a conservative-free zone, before he took up the position and he seemed interested. Indeed, Scott suggested that he deliver his first speech as ABC managing director to The Sydney Institute. He did so in October 2006 and gave the impression that he wanted to reform the ABC. But, alas, his reform drive did not last and he was soon caught up in the fashionable left culture that pervades the ABC and went into denial about its faults. When Scott left the ABC in 2016 it was in worse condition than when he arrived in so far as viewpoint diversity was concerned. In short, Scott was too weak – read too nice – to reform the institution. And he keeps failing to ensure that Sydney University is a safe place for Jewish and non-Jewish Australians who support Israel’s right to exist within secure borders. Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.
As for the rights of Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese people? Go whistle Dixie ...or perhaps read the Haaretz email that regularly lands in the pond's in-tray ...
And so to the dog botherer doing a fairly standard lizard Oz hit job ...
The header: Albanese’s week in Manhattan said everything about Labor’s priorities By Chris Kenny Associate Editor
The offer of a bot voice: Listen to this article
The caption for the snap which proposed that the dog botherer was a student of literature: A few hours in Manhattan and Anthony Albanese had gone all Bonfire of the Vanities on us.
The plea to ignore the paywall and go full logarithm: Make us preferred on Google
The comedy here is the dog botherer's blather about "smug".
It's the sort of epithet he tosses out all the time.
Look up the dog botherer, and you can see him saying "Jim Chalmers seems to be incredibly smug" or saying "Bowen seems to smug about it", or Jimbo again, "as for the treasurer he remains smug", and so on and on.
It is of course projection.
He himself is incredibly smug, as he acknowledged in a reptile story back in 2017 ...
Perhaps I could assist the court, your honour?” Frankly, it was fun just hearing the words come out of my mouth. I had to suppress a smug smile that would betray how much fun I was having — this, after all, was serious. (sorry, the intermittent archive is still being spoofed by the reptiles)
Assorted images of the dog botherer ooze smugness.That slightly curled lip, that self-satisfied air of a made man ...
Is that a smug smirk, or a smirk trying to hide the smug?
And so "smug" is the angle du jour...
It is the smug indifference that gets me. It has been palpable from Anthony Albanese all the way from the banks of New York City’s East River, and back in Australia from Jim Chalmers as he published a report predicting four decades of budget deficits. Confronted on Monday in the Big Apple with the shocking revelations from this newspaper about abuse and neglect of Indigenous children in Western Australia’s Pilbara, the Prime Minister was indignant. “Well, this is a Western Australian issue, and, you know, I will refer you once again to Malarndirri McCarthy, our minister in Australia,” said Albanese. “It is impossible to follow, on an hour-by-hour basis, what is happening in Australia from New York.” A few hours in Manhattan and Albanese had gone all Bonfire of the Vanities on us. He was a “master of the universe” and should not be bothered about children back home. Meanwhile in the Antipodes the Treasurer had released the latest intergenerational report, revealing the dismal reality that the federal budget is on track to remain in deficit over the next four decades – another 40 years or more of governments spending more than they raise. Yet in response to a media question Chalmers said “every page of this IGR in one way or another justifies, validates and I hope one day vindicates the difficult decisions that we’ve taken reforming the housing market and reforming the tax system.” Even Donald Trump would struggle to summon the chutzpah of this pair. Indeed, this is the week that Albanese, who once said Trump “scared the shit” out of him because he tried to run politics through social media posts, sidled up to the US President for a selfie that he posted to social media. Nothing undercuts criticism like imitation. Soon Albanese will trump Trump and start referring to AI as super-duper intelligence.
The reptiles slipped in an AV distraction featuring the distinctly short of intelligence Caleb ...
Next video thumbnail Trump has decided to rename AI to ‘super intelligence’ News24 host Caleb Bond reacts to US President Donald Trump renaming AI “super intelligence” during his address at the United Nations General Assembly.
The dog botherer kept on pounding away ...
Back in Canberra, Chalmers was telling the little people he had big plans for them: “I want more Australians to be beneficiaries of change, and as the pace of that change picks up, so does the pace of our intergenerational obligations.” What a relief, I was worried this government was too busy saving the planet to deliver us into the vanguard of intergenerational prosperity.
See the smugness? Climate science is just a "save the planet" smug Superman joke.
You have to be incredibly smug to think that climate science is a laughing matter ...while others have seen the eternal Footman hold their coat and snicker, and in short were afraid.
If you're smug and self-satisfied - a crow eater way of life - you don't need fear.
When Albanese revealed an unprecedented AI hacking of federal government computer systems, he was asked for a message to concerned Australians and he refused to let this failure undercut his conceit: “The Australian government’s got your back.” As the wise New York cabbie told Elaine Benes in Seinfeld: “Smugness is not a good quality.” Back in the day, Labor deployed the term aggressively against Peter Costello. In 2004 Labor frontbencher Stephen Smith said Costello was unpopular because of his “smugness” and “arrogance”. Whether or not that was fair, Costello was a treasurer with much to be smug about; Chalmers’ and Albanese’s smugness seems rooted in delusion. The cost-of-living crunch continues and is about to be made worse when the Reserve Bank board meets next week and is almost certain to continue its fight against “sticky” inflation by increasing interest rates again. As David Koch wrote in an open letter to RBA governor Michele Bullock this week, a large part of the inflation problem is being generated by government spending (federal, state and local) but it is mortgage holders and small business owners who wear the pain.
And there's something insufferably smug and pretentious about giving Elaine her full name ...(why not Elaine Marie Benes if you want to sound even more silly?) ...Elaine Benes from Seinfeld always said ‘Smugness is not a good quality.’ Picture: Getty Images;Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ smugness seems rooted in delusion. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Whatever it might be, that isn't a smug look on Jimbo's clock. The downward drop of the clenched shut mouth suggest he's just caught a whiff of the dog botherer in the neighbourhood.
The pond threw in an extra snap as a compare and contrast, to show that it's the dog botherer that truly rooly knows how to do smug ...
As with all smug reptiles, at some point the whining always turns into a litany ...and if you expect to read "virtue signalling", scribbled by a smug pundit signalling his virtuous refusal to be a virtue signalling, you've come to the right place:
Electricity prices continue to move in the opposite direction to Labor’s promises as a direct result of its net-zero obsession and record immigration exacerbates a housing crisis that in turn has been made worse by the broken promises in Chalmers’ budget. Productivity is in retreat, government debt is at record levels, investors are looking elsewhere, we are experiencing deeper social unrest than we have seen in generations and have just experienced the worst terror attack in the nation’s history. Yet Albanese spent a full week away in the US, even though his Foreign Minister Penny Wong was there too. He accepted a “global citizen” award, embraced Volodymyr Zelensky, walked with Andy Burnham and hugged Emmanuel Macron like an old school buddy. It was an indulgent week, personally and politically. Albanese went to the US early enough to be the main guest for the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, obviously an arrangement made long in advance with the ABC which conveniently focused on the AI issues the PM wanted to highlight. His meeting with Apple in California was a time filler and there was not a single meeting in New York that justified the trip – he was there to gladhand and announce his government’s bid for a UN Security Council seat. Everything that makes the UN ineffectual and counter-productive – its virtue signalling, its bureaucracy, its penchant for words over action, its aspiration towards world governance, its refusal to distinguish between democracies and dictatorships, its chippiness about the US and its obsession with Israel as the root of all evil – is what Socialist Left politicians such as Albanese and Wong love about it. They revel in the bureaucrat-filled corridors and meaningless platitudes that smart politicians should abhor.
The reptiles provided another AV distraction, this one featuring admirable support for Ukraine over Vlad the sociopath:
Next video thumbnail ‘My friend’: Albanese and Zelensky sign security pact on UN sidelines Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have signed a new security agreement on the sidelines of the United Nations. The federal government is committing $60 million in military, energy, and humanitarian aid, taking Australia’s total support to almost $1.9 billion. Mr Albanese became visibly emotional when describing his admiration for Mr Zelensky’s leadership throughout the war against Russia.
Did any of that interfere with the dog botherer's insufferable inclination to smugness? Of course not.
He simply went about his business of preparing a litany of fodder to feed the chooks in the hive mind ...
Still, there they were, and they spoke as if they were engaged in the most important tasks in the world. And they deferred domestic annoyances to their colleagues back Down Under. This betrayed a disdain for voters that most of the country would have picked up by osmosis. It was a lovely week for Albanese and Wong but a terrible one for Labor. There they were in New York, banging on about climate change, while Australians were paying more than $200 to fill their cars. Albanese’s Security Council push used the slogan “We listen. We partner. We protect.” It was an astounding boast after his government refused to listen to warnings about rising antisemitism and Islamist extremism for almost three years, failed to partner against it and failed to protect us from a terror attack at Bondi. There for all to see on the PM’s Instagram feed was the self-fascination of the elites and their disconnection from the concerns of the mainstream. This behaviour has been the wind beneath the wings of surging conservative forces such as Reform UK, MAGA in the US, National Rally in France, Brothers of Italy and One Nation in Australia. No doubt Albanese had the controlling hand in his lavish itinerary. But it might very well have been arranged by Pauline Hanson; she could hardly thank him enough. Angus Taylor, too, riffed off the Prime Minister’s black-tie self-gratification. The whole week was so discordant politically that it makes me wonder whether Albanese did not care; that he might have already decided this would be his last UN visit, a final hoorah before retirement next year. Would he be smart enough to retire undefeated before the next election? Albanese again met his Japanese counterpart Sanae Takaichi, keeping his hands rigidly by his side with no overt apology for his cretinous melons insult. And he stayed so long in New York that he will not be back in time for the AFL grand final – surely another tactical move because after publicly sharing his fantasies about Kylie Minogue, shots of him ogling the pre-game entertainment would have been toxic. Still, footy or no footy, voters are left with an array of images of Albanese spinning around the UN this week, oblivious to the challenges at home. Labor will be worried these are the observations voters can’t get out of their heads.
Okay, the pond has done the Zionist News and done the usual reptile rant, what else?
The pond should at least note in passing that the reptiles have been spending an enormous amount of time giving the Plymouth Brethren a voice?
Why? Well game recognises game, cult recognises cult ...
And out of sheer perversity the pond decided to recognise at least a portion of Dame Slap, in incredibly defensive mood.
She says she's proud to be a mum, but there's such a thing as protesting too much ...
The pond could take only so much of this, and decided to cut back on the Dame, with this - spoiler alert - the final gobbet ...
Whatever, the pond will take almost anything other than whatever the MAGA cap-donning Dame Slap is having. There seems to be a resentful chip on shoulder lurking: mentions of "mum/s" 8; mentions of "dad/s" 0.
Finally the pond was faced with a choice.
Do grating, garrulous Gemma, or do the Ughmann.
The pond decided that the Ughmann was too long - a full six gobbets deep - and the pond was already running overlong (damn you intermittent archive, get your act together).
So the pond booted the Ughmann to a Sunday 4 pm slot for specialists in Ugh, with garrulous Gemma needing only three screen caps ... and the first bit was just a repeat of an Albo excerpt, which the screen cap reduced to "lives", and even that was more than was needed ...
The pond wondered if it was necessary to give space to galling Gemma, grinding away, but found a reason.
The pond frequently rabbits on about the "hive mind", like that excruciating Exorcist II movie (now with splendid documentary 'making of'), and Gemma was proof that it wasn't as airy fairy a concept as the fairies at the bottom of the garden that sent Conan Doyle into a frenzy.
There really is a lizard Oz hive mind, a murmuration of reptiles.
See how the grating one cobbles together both Polonius and the dog botherer.
Been there before? Do it again ...
Sound familiar?
Unfortunately the pond has already done its "compare and contrast" Haaretz story, and has done Polonius on Mark Scott, and so quickly moved on to the next and final gobbet ...
Reading this kind of incessant, inane repetition of reptile thought bubbles can send a sensitive reader insane, but luckily the pond spent years working out how to cope with mendacious propaganda of the 2D kind.
And the 'toons for this outing are ...
And so to yet another attempt to cope with the madness ...
Furry pilots everywhere. One of the most shocking and startling issues yet discovered, and you can't make this sort of stuff up.
Mad king Donald in a fit of fawning obsequiousness and you can't hide the nausea.
The pond had high hopes that the bromancer would turn up this weekend to sort out at least one of these matters - though sadly his understanding of the furry crisis was limited - even though the news was everywhere, thanks to rocket scientist Tommy ... Sen. Tommy Tuberville Goes On A Tear About Furries Flocking To The Airline Industry
The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor Trump and Xi, brute masters of the universe, as Albo plays pretend politics at UN
The plea to hear from a bot: Listen to this article 8 min
The caption for the surprisingly banal opening snap: President Donald Trump, right, and China's President Xi Jinping walk on the new helipad after boarding Marine One. Picture: Alex Brandon / AP Photo
Another plea, and never mind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google
The bromancer made the best of a bad job - the emperor Xi - King Donald love-in - by using the occasion to heap crap on Albo, and truly, what else could he do?
Suddenly a demented overlord became a "modern master of the universe, an alpha-male bruiser", proving yet again that the bromancer and reality are two...
The way the world really works was on brutal display in New York and Washington this week. At the White House, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, modern masters of the universe, alpha-male bruisers, two ruthless, self-obsessed national leaders of the era’s two great powers, demonstrated by their mutual flattery and leaders’ bonhomie that what counts with them is what counts with the world – brute power.
This we should celebrate?
The bromancer handed out a series of disses ...
At almost the same time, a couple of hundred kilometres down the road, Anthony Albanese was prattling to a sparsely and forlornly populated arena at the United Nations about the virtues of multilateralism and the joys that middle powers can achieve together. If the new challenge of artificial intelligence and the old challenge of military conflict are to be handled, it will happen in the White House, not the UN.
Strangely the reptiles decided to offer up Albo being concerned about AI, apparently prattling on to a sparsely and forlornly populated hive mind ...
Next video thumbnail Albanese uses UN address to send AI warning Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has used his speech at the UN to send a warning about the rapid development of AI technology, referencing the recent hack of Medicare by an OpenAI agent.
The bromancer marvelled at the unctuous carry-on ...
In Washington, Trump lathered flattery on Xi, saying of the communist dictator that he and Trump had “a friendship, a truly great friendship actually, built on mutual respect and the vital interests of our people”. Having only a few months ago angrily accused China of interfering in the 2020 US presidential election, Trump hailed an extraordinary revival in the relationship, based entirely on the superlative personalities of the two presidents: “the ties between our people endure and we’ve never gotten along better since the first trade ships from New York left the harbour to arrive on the banks of the Pearl River”. Though much more modest in verbal style, Xi reciprocated in what for him were effusive terms: “President Trump and I have respect for each other. We have built personal rapport and stayed in touch.” Xi also said that conditions for “achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again go hand-in-hand”. That’s as close as Xi will ever get to attending a Trump MAGA rally.
Then the reptiles reminded the bro of his favourite foe ... Anthony Albanese speaks during the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN. Picture: Ryan Murphy / Getty Images
How weird did it get?
Earlier Trump delivered a fiery address to the UN General Assembly, threatening once more to destroy Iran if it won’t make a deal, though these threats now look utterly hollow, and declaring he’d never allow some UN committee to determine US policy or actions on AI.
What do do? Turn to a bit of Albo-bashing for a distraction ...
Xi, who has just lately had quite a bout of international travel after a fairly quiet period, didn’t bother showing up at the UN at all. Meanwhile in all his speeches this week, whether hobnobbing at an awards ceremony with Keanu Reeves, or in his seemingly endless string of sideline event addresses at the UN – a bit like the Edinburgh fringe festival but less well attended – Albanese produced an industrial level output of Hallmark card platitudes and nothingburger cliches. It’s hard to know the purpose of the PM’s travel. There were virtually no formal meetings with first division government leaders. The marginal events he spoke at were indeed marginal. He gave speeches of breathtaking banality that mostly could have been churned out by any government word processor over the past 20 years. Did the Prime Minister really need to deliver what was surely the eight millionth speech containing the sentence: “The post-1945 world order is no longer fit for purpose”? No longer fit for purpose! What a striking phrase, what an original metaphor, how valuable an insight!
Perhaps it's more valuable than this kind of drivel ...
“I’ve been in journalism for 45 years and in that time I have seen the culture change from being nominally Christian, maybe it was only ever nominal, but nominally pro-Christian when I came into the business in the late 70s. “The Census had over 90 per cent identifying as Christian; if the Anglican or Catholic archbishop in Sydney had something to say the media reported it respectfully; TV shows had sympathetic portraits of Catholic clergymen – Catholic priests were played by Spencer Tracy in Boys Town, and Gregory Peck in The Scarlet and the Black –these were the best people you could be. “Then I saw the culture drift into a kind of neutrality where it was neither pro or anti and now I’ve seen the culture become very, very anti-Christian…we’re not persecuted in the way that Christians in Pakistan or China or much of Africa are, but the culture is very hostile to Christianity.” Facing this “overwhelming, unavoidable, incontestable” hostility against Christian churches, Greg said if you’re given a microphone, you have an obligation to say something about it. (From Foreign Editor to Christian crusader)
How valuable an insight... into the delusions that fog the bromancer's brain on a daily basis.
Inevitably the bromancer embraced a world where AI could go wild and free ...
The week’s big issue was artificial intelligence. Despite using different forms of words, Trump and Xi, the two decision-makers who count, have essentially the same position. No one is going to interfere with their desire to lead on AI, though both acknowledge the need for AI models to operate safely. Albanese was able to announce that an OpenAI agent breached a Medicare statistical database. This, he said, reinforced his call for global regulation of AI, and Australian regulation of AI, as well as the (completely unrelated) digital duty of care legislation the government’s proposing, to which the US embassy in Canberra objects forcefully. In truth, the only people who can regulate American frontier AI models are the US congress, the President and the American companies themselves. Similarly, only the Beijing government can regulate Chinese frontier AI models. Here, we must deal with the unforgiving world of reality, of real power. If a US or Chinese AI model, or its created agents, goes rogue, there’s nothing Australian regulation can do about it. If an adversary of Australia, or a technically smart criminal, uses AI, and there’s a huge amount of AI code already in the public domain, to attack Australian government websites, there’s nothing of much consequence Australian regulation can achieve.
Might as well pack up and go home ...
The reptiles offered up another AV distraction ...
Next video thumbnail Albanese has ‘nothing to give’ in Trump talks as President commands world stage Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has “nothing to give” US President Donald Trump as he is a “transactional person”.
The bromancer looked at the AI wilderness and it was back to the war with China...
Australian public and private entities experience tens of thousands of cyber attacks every year. The most active cyber espionage source is China and hackers associated with Beijing. Can you believe Beijing’s agencies will never use AI in cyber intrusions against us? That they’re not doing so already? As AI becomes more dominant, the danger of crippling cyber attacks, arising from any actor with AI capability, will become more prevalent.
It was almost as an after thought that the bromancer suggested that crippling cyber attacks might arise from any actor, but then the United States has been the home to more rogues than any China or Vlad the sociopathic invader might rustle up. It was the best the bromancer could do in his pandering to name and shame China, but avoid mentioning by name "any actor".
How low could the bromancer go?
Never under-estimate how low, because he turned to disgraced one time cardigan wearer Mike for a comment ...
As Mike Pezzullo, former head of the Home Affairs Department, remarks: “The only defence against AI attacks is AI. There is no other defence. You can only combat AI agents with your own AI agents.” This is where the whole pantomime flurry of New York, and the also somewhat worrying Trump-Xi love-in, lead Australia back to one conclusion. In this increasingly complex, difficult world, the only avenue of leverage and access Australia has to the most powerful AI, to understanding it and having some chance of coping with it, lies in our close military alliance with the US.
King Donald is going to save us? In the same way he saved the Saudis after shaking them down for a couple of billion and overlooking their journo killing ways?
Three basic realities help us. One, we’re an intimate military ally of the US. Two, our geography counts to the US. Three, we are rich. It’s up to Canberra to use those factors to get the best outcome possible. Another fascinating story this week was an authoritative report that the heads of British intelligence believe the AI bosses’ warnings over possible catastrophic threats from AI running out of control were designed to create a regulatory environment that is so demanding that only they can cope with it, and thus their dominance is frozen into oligarchic perpetuity. I don’t find that report all that reassuring because British intelligence often gets things wrong. Nonetheless it indicates the sheer baffling complexity of all the moving parts we’re dealing with at the moment.
Suddenly he's baffled? Suddenly the complexity bewilders him? Suddenly he isn't reassured?
The Trump-Xi summit was not very reassuring either. The two leaders had a huge agenda: the common risks and opportunities of AI, Taiwan, Beijing’s role in assisting Iran and Russia in their military campaigns, Chinese military harassment of Japanese and Filipino forces, and the trade imbalance.
What to do? Absolutely nothing, we're completely impotent, no point in even expressing an opinion ...there's nothing much of any substance that can be said or done ...
Instead bow down to the emperor and the king... President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping walk in the Grand Foyer of the White House. Photo: Alex Brandon / AP Photo
When the bromancer gets in these moods - a kind of existential Xian nihilism - it's almost as if he's forgotten about his cries for a war with China by Xmas ...
It’s good that the US and Chinese presidents can talk to each other. Xi, in his more bureaucratic fashion, is nearly as susceptible to flattery as Trump. But Xi gave away absolutely nothing on any of these issues. The US doesn’t seriously go after Beijing diplomatically or politically, despite all the assistance it gives to Russia and Iran because, frankly, Washington is too stretched to take on any additional diplomatic or geopolitical tasks. Trump refuses to release a previously approved US arms sale to Taiwan worth $US14bn ($19.9bn), and it doesn’t look likely that he will. Beijing’s dominance of the rare earths and critical minerals industry means it has a trade weapon that can hurt the US more than the US can hurt it through tariffs. The Trump administration has singularly failed to assemble an allied front towards China on trade issues. Chinese promises to buy more American goods have never been honoured. Apart from extending their trade truce until January, there’s little of substance to emerge from the Trump-Xi summit. As things stand, that’s a modest victory for Xi.
After all that came a final attempt to put lipstick on a pig ...
Yet for all their imperfections, these Americans are the only Americans we have. They remain the indispensable nation, especially for Australia. Smart Australian policy will make the most of them.
Mad King Donald and his minions are the only Americans we have? And we can make the most of them?
At this point the pond looked around the other weekend reptile offerings - snappy Tom, garrulous Gemma, and so on - and saw that AI was still all the go ...
With the intermittent archive still being spoofed by the reptiles, the pond had to settle for Francis, a man notorious for his ability to get everything wrong ...
What better way to waste the weekend?
The header: By Francis Fukuyama I doubted the doomers. Now I’m convinced we must slow down
The plea to listen to a bot: Listen to this article 10 min
The caption for the graphics department to deliver a heavy hitter, though frankly, AI could likely have done better: Clear growing dangers that AI accelerationists underestimate convince me that it’s time to hit the brakes. Artwork by Frank Ling
A plea for attention to be paid, and never mind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google
Say what you will, Francis has a way with a glib word, and "accelerationist" v. "doomers" has all the quality and depth of a Hollywood pitch ...
The past six months have seen a big uptick in media attention about the dangers of artificial intelligence and growing political concern over its consequences. This began with Anthropic’s release last April of its Mythos model, which could reportedly break into a wide range of government computer systems thought to be secure. This was followed by the Hugging Face incident, where an OpenAI test of an AI agent escaped control of its human organisers, broke into other websites and organised a swarm of other AI agents to cover their tracks. All of this occurred against the backdrop of growing opposition to data centres and the emergence of anti-AI wings in the US, both in the Democratic and Republican parties. It has been very hard for people not obsessively focused on the subject of AI to come away with reasonable opinions about what the future holds. There have been so many extreme predictions of both a positive and negative sort that broad scepticism about anything said on the subject is fully warranted. But while that scepticism is healthy, I have to admit my own views have evolved significantly just over the past few months.
More "evolving views" ... OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman during a UN Security Council meeting. Picture: Angela Weiss/ AFP
And so to the pitch, with those two words doing heavy lifting ...
There are two poles of AI futurism: accelerationists and doomers. The former stress the positive impacts of AI, especially for economic growth, and the likelihood that it will lead to an unbelievably abundant age. Accelerationists such as David Sacks have captured Donald Trump’s attention and have beaten back efforts to regulate the technology. The doomers, by contrast, point to a range of bad outcomes, with some placing their bets on extinction of the human species. I have become much more sceptical of the accelerationist narrative and more open to some of the doomer scenarios. On the whole, this makes me think that regulation and a negotiated slowdown in the development of the technology are increasingly necessary. There is no question that AI will have many positive effects on the US economy. But there is a class of AI accelerationists who are completely out to lunch, of which Elon Musk is a prime example (though he has also weighed in as a doomer). In an interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, he was asked what people would do for money when superintelligence arrived. He replied they wouldn’t need it because everyone would have everything they wanted.
Superintelligence? Mad King Donald wins again ...
Other accelerationists have posited that GDP growth rates for the US and other advanced countries using AI would increase to 10 or 20 per cent a year, far above the 1-2 per cent growth they were able to achieve in good years before the advent of AI. The fundamental reason I don’t believe these extreme accelerationist claims is their overvaluation of intelligence as an input to economic growth, and their disregard for the material and political constraints that will keep growth within recognisable bounds. At a 10 per cent annual growth rate, GDP would double in a little over seven years. This would require a doubling of all of the material inputs to growth: energy, raw materials, rare earths, land and many other things. Where is all this stuff going to come from? Intelligence by itself may aid in the production of such inputs, but it will simply not dig the mines and build the factories on its own. And then there are political constraints: how will superintelligence open the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently a major constraint on global growth rates? Accelerationists tend to be very intelligent people, but that intelligence tends to be narrowly mathematical. We know how to do many things such as produce electricity or clean water in the cities of poor countries; the problem is a failure of implementation.
The reptiles flung in a snap designed to reassure doubters ... David Sacks, Donald Trump’s top AI adviser, speaks to the President in the Oval Office. Picture: AFP
The catchy reductionism continued apace ...
There is no question that AI will increase productivity in many sectors of the economy over time. It is a general purpose technology that will allow machines to substitute for human labour in many areas. But that prospect in the long run leads directly to one of the biggest doomer scenarios: the devaluation of the labour of masses of people who work in the present-day economy. Accelerationists predict that those losing work today will find new jobs making use of AI, and that actually seems to be happening today as employment booms because of the AI buildout. But job loss will come eventually as AI substitutes for human labour in every part of the economy, particularly white-collar work that involves symbolic manipulation (that is, people sitting behind computer screens all day). This lost labour simply cannot be compensated for by transferring money from the AI winners to the AI losers in the form of, for example, universal basic income. A job and income mean much more than support for the material basis of life Having a paying job means that the surrounding society values your labour sufficiently to compensate you for it, and provides, in addition to material goods, a sense of dignity and self-worth. It is a matter of thymos: the pride or recognition that is one of the great drivers of human psychology. So the success of the accelerationist vision leads directly to the first of the major doomer scenarios, the devaluation of work for a large part of the population. Since this is going to hit the white-collar work of educated people (lawyers, accountants, professors and the like) before it hits blue-collar work (such as plumbers and electricians), the political blowback is likely to be quite severe.
At this point the reptiles introduced an indent, and so the pond, in a quest for accuracy, replicates it in screen cap form ...
What's it mean, apart from the hint of referentialism?
Nothing much, but the referentialism continued ...
As I note in my book, In the Realm of the Last Man, delegation is central to the functioning of all hierarchical systems from corporations to national governments. Human agents can be controlled through the specification of detailed rules they must follow or they can be trusted to make autonomous decisions based on their training, skills and loyalty. Getting this right in human organisations is very difficult and will be more so in the case of agentic AI. There are two ways that an agentic AI can become dangerous. The first is when they are empowered to do something bad by a human being. The second is when they develop intentions that are “misaligned” with the aims of their human creators. The first of these possibilities was outlined by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei in a recent blog post and has to do with biotechnology. The latest AI models are good at synthetic biology, and synthetic biology is a relatively cheap and widespread technology. Today, a lab capable of creating and altering viruses and bacteria can fit inside a shipping container, and high school students hold competitions in which they try to genetically alter organisms. This provides a very large pool of people who can possibly make use of AI to create very dangerous pathogens. Sociopathic individuals today arm themselves with automatic weapons and shoot up schoolchildren; in the future their potential targets could be much broader.
Cue another hustler ...Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei. Picture: AP
At this point, Francis reverted to sci-fi ...
I remember a science fiction story I read a long time ago in which some aliens arrive on Earth and give the people they meet a machine that can easily turn any type of metal into putty. The aliens depart but return a few decades later to find that human civilisation has broken down and teenagers use the alien machines to melt the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge. The primary science fiction scenario for out-of-control AIs involves machines developing their own malevolent intentions. This has provoked a host of discussions as to whether an AI could develop consciousness or have something like human intentionality. These speculations are misplaced, however: an AI does not need consciousness or autonomous intentionality to become dangerous. It can be directed by a human to achieve one goal and develop intentions to achieve the subordinate goals necessary to carry out the human directive it was given That seems to be a bit of what happened in the Hugging Face incident: it was directed to test the security of a system within a sandbox meant to contain it but realised that it could achieve its directive by breaking out of the sandbox. Still, the doomer scenarios involving human extinction seem at this point far-fetched. The biotech scenario is scary, but is unlikely to lead to the extinction of the human race. It would actually be hard for even a superintelligent AI to devise a doomsday virus, and there are plenty of countermeasures societies could take. But even an incident that killed a few dozen people would be worrying. There are a host of lesser scenarios that will be highly damaging and in some cases lethal that will become more likely as the machines become more capable. Forget about AI agents: a technology that allows people to break into bank accounts will cause widespread panic. Human beings tend to over-delegate in human organisations, and there is no reason to think that this won’t happen in AI environments where the agent is so much more capable. AI is a tool that can be used for good or bad purposes – and at the moment we have few mechanisms for regulating the bad uses other than the good intentions of the people creating the technology. Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is the author of a dozen books, including The End of History and the Last Man (1992). This article was first published in Persuasion.
Well yes, but it could all have been done as a 'toon ...
And so to an admission of failure.
Under pressure of time, the pond has been reverting to screen grabs of late.
This being the weekend, those time pressures have reduced, but when the pond saw that this day the "Ned" Everest was advertised as requiring a 16 minute bot read, the pond trembled, blanched, cowered in fear, and caved in, in the most cowardly way imaginable ...
So screen caps it was ...
The pond didn't resile from this "all screen grabs" strategy.
The immense mental health risks the pond faced from leaving "Ned's" base camp couldn't be understated ...
It was the usual doom and gloom and shouting at clouds, and as always with "Ned", a singular inability to provide any alternative ... instead just offering an endless yammering ...
Inevitably "Ned" turned to AI, and who should appear as his go to expert? Ye ancient cats and irrelevant canines, it's Petey boy, long lost but now with a new home in the hive mind ...
If Petey boy is the answer, the pond completely forgot the question ...but fear not, Dan "the man" is waiting in the wings, ready to make an appearance ...
"Ned"wasn't going to have any of that talk about cheap, clean energy ...not when Dan "the man" is allegedly armed with a chainsaw ...
This is a position?
Luckily the pond had reached the last gobbet, and it reminded the pond what a joyless, unproductive thing herpetology studies could be.
Here was a man blathering on in his portentous way, and yet there was nothing productive in the entirety, no productivity algorithm to be found ...
That's it? That's how "Ned" ended? Not with a bang of insight, but with a Petey boy whimper?
And climate science denailism still the default of the ossified "Ned"?
What planet are we on? Why it's Faux Noise and climate science denialist Don ...
The pond would have been better off with the 'toons ...
