In which the pond celebrates Our Homeric Henry, gets distracted by the frontier wars, and turns to Vlad the sociopath for a shining example of how to do a colonial invasion ...

 

It didn't matter what the pompous ponce, Our Homeric Henry, was pontificating about today, there was no way that the pond could reduce him to a few sterile screen caps.

He had to live, to breathe, to be in a form where herpetology students might copy and paste, might suck in the fragrance of the written word.

The pond had a momentary pause for doubt - especially when the pond looked at the topic at hand.

Not another rant about AI.

But the pond plucked up courage, looked at the bright side, wondered if a reference to Odysseus might be the reward, knew deep in heart that some ancient philosopher held the key ...

The header: By Henry Ergas
AI no more dangerous than human stupidity

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8 min

The caption for a mystifying snap. Patience, all will become clear: Barcelona in Spain is near the bottom of the list of cities with more than five million inhabitants

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Now some might wonder at the headline, what with human stupidity incredibly dangerous. After all, human stupidity has led to a couple of world wars, a means to end life on earth by way of nukes, and an even more splendid way to end life on earth by way of global warming (aided and abetted by denialists of the lizard Oz kind).

Ergo, AI must be incredibly dangerous.

But the pond must not pre-empt Our Henry's philosophically based conclusions.

Our Henry started strong, proving he was no top of events, by referencing rogue Anthropic refugee Evan Hubinger, Anthropic Researcher Warns There’s ‘>10% Chance’ AI Could ‘Kill All Humans’ By Next Decade

Devoted followers of Our Homeric Henry will be relieved to discover - spoiler alert - that this was just a feint, a distraction, and that the answer lies in Kant.

But first there's a journey and reassurance to be delivered to wilting hive mind brains:

Evan Hubinger’s much-quoted statement that there is at least a 10 per cent chance artificial intelligence will end human life within a decade is, without an explanation of what that number means or how it was derived, as uninformative as it is misleading.
Worse, it distracts from both the nature of the problem and the most sensible responses.
And by pandering to the sloppy apocalyptic thinking that permeates the climate extinction movement, it has unleashed the mother of all scare campaigns, culminating in Australia’s signing of a “feel-good” declaration urging international regulation of AI.
At the heart of that campaign sits a curiously familiar number: 10 per cent, recurring with extraordinary constancy throughout the doomsday rhetoric of the age.
That constancy is readily explained: 10 per cent is the Goldilocks of apocalyptic probability estimates – just small enough to be plausible, just large enough to be absolutely terrifying.

Goldilocks? Steady, faint of heart. Our Henry is likely referencing the Robert Southey version from the nineteenth century, a literary work full of depth and meaning ...

Our Henry cast porridge on troubled waters ...

Terrifying it certainly is, even in the narrowest economic terms. Counting only existing lives, and valuing them at two million dollars each, the actuarial cost (that is, the potential loss multiplied by its likelihood of occurring) equals 15 years of world GDP; at the frequently used benchmark of 10 million dollars each, that rises to 75 years of everything the world currently produces.
Magnified by the far greater human costs, those figures would justify incurring vast sacrifices to avert catastrophe, as the doomsayers seem to intend. But with the dominant AI platforms having an interest in hindering new competition, and the Chinese regime in stifling AI’s development in the West, calls for a “slowdown” warrant the strictest scrutiny. And even the slightest look highlights the claims’ fragility.
There are, for example, 83 cities with five million or more inhabitants. Yet together they account for less than 20 per cent of the world’s population. An extinction event, or anything approaching it, would presumably have to devastate them all, or at least the vast majority.
Assume, however, that doing so requires 12 disastrous outages in each city, from water systems collapsing to nuclear power plants exploding.

The reptiles flung in an alarming image ... The crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station after the damage caused by an earhtquake (sic, so and thus, thanks AI editing) and tsunami in 2011

Our Henry was more than up to the task, and provided a statistical savaging ...

The event then depends on 1000 conditions being met, each with (say) a 10 per cent probability of occurring. If those conditions are independent – meaning none makes any other more or less likely – the aggregate likelihood is vanishingly small: one divided by 10 raised to the power of 1000, which is effectively zero.
Even a hundredfold increase in the number of ways in which disaster could unfold scarcely changes that conclusion. It would take approximately 10 to the power of 998 independent pathways, rather than a hundred, before the probability ceased to be effectively zero. Indeed, with only 100 pathways, the probability of each condition being triggered would need to rise from 10 per cent to roughly 97 per cent just to nudge the dial towards the lowest single digits and raise the actuarial cost to $1.
Nor do the problems end there. Saying “10 per cent” conveys an aura of precision; but that need not rest on precise knowledge. The 10 per cent could perfectly well reflect profound uncertainty between two possibilities: the first, with a nine-in-10 weight, is that catastrophe is virtually impossible; the second, with a weight of one in 10, is that it is nearly inevitable. Taken on its own, the headline number tells us nothing about how tightly its assessment is bounded or about its practical implications.
We are therefore entirely in the dark as to the estimate’s significance and robustness. Yet it is not merely a truism that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence: it is a foundational proposition of modern statistical inference.

The pond was bemused when the hole in bucket man followed that up with a gigantic billy boat butt ...

None of that proves Hubinger’s estimate is incorrect. 

That sort of butt is always, almost mystically followed by a corrective "but" ...

But the illustrative calculations, precisely because they are assumption-laden, show that asserting a probability is grossly insufficient: there has to be a transparent analysis to substantiate it. Moreover, simply pointing to occasional AI malfunctions won’t cut the mustard: it is one thing for an AI system to hack into a website and quite another for it to end human life in a fit of suicidal malevolence.

At this point came another very modest set of billy goat butts ...

None of this denies that AI poses real risks – risks lucidly anticipated in the 1960s by Norbert Wiener and Isidore Gudak (later IJ Good), two of its most important pioneers.
A simple analogy helps explain their concern. Tell a travel agency you must fly from Perth to Melbourne for the AFL grand final, and you would be horrified if, finding all flights booked, it arranged for a ticketed passenger to be assassinated, thus freeing a seat – and astonished too, since your request presupposed the agency would act within unspoken limits you assumed were understood.

In this dangerous world of analogies, who should arrive to give excellent advice? Eminent German philosopher Immanuel Kant, as always a voice of reason

Inspired by the presence of Kant, Our Henry reached new levels of rhetorical insight ...

The point, put more abstractly, is that every instruction that is not strictly formulaic carries what philosophers call a “surplus of meaning”. In practice, we readily handle the resulting vagueness through “contextual disambiguation”: drawing on shared knowledge, conventions and expectations to read not merely what the words say, but what the speaker intends and what limits that implies. Those shared understandings are instilled through lived, collective socialisation – something no volume of scanned text can convey.
Instead, whatever AI systems display is induced statistically from data and feedback, rather than experience, and because every decision rule that process induces needs a further rule to fix its application, the training mechanism can never fully close off the risk of error.
Just as that has been known for decades, so too has the broad architecture of the solutions.
The danger, Wiener wrote, lies in using “to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it, because the action is so fast and irrevocable that we have not the data to intervene before the action is complete”.
The answer, first conceptualised in the 1960s by Herbert Simon – another of AI’s greatest pioneers, and alone among them in holding both the Turing Award and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics – has three components.

The reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, because mad King Donald is still ruler of them all ...

Next video thumbnail
Trump administration scolds Albanese over ‘censorious’ tech crackdown
News24 host James Macpherson says the Trump administration has “scolded” the Australian Labor Party for their censorious Digital Duty of Care laws.

And so to Our Henry's Kantian konclusion:

The first is to keep failures contained by building walls into the systems: modular, separate parts with no shared point of failure and filters between them to assess errors. Secondly, provide the scope to halt the decision process by installing stopping points, so a single step cannot drag outcomes to irreversibility. And third, ensure visibility through instruments, logs and an escalating structure of alerts that show what the system is doing while it is doing it, rather than just tracking what it has produced.
These measures are not costless, and easier said than done. But they are no more than good engineering practice, checkable and even certifiable. Better still, they do not require a “slowdown” in technological progress, raising entry barriers or allowing China to steal the race. And they are far less socially harmful than that ultimate folly, the precautionary principle, which has become technophobia’s figleaf of choice.
The real risk is not that AI will kill us; it is that relying on increasingly intelligent machines will make us increasingly stupid, further eroding our collective capacity for clear thought and entrenching the hysteria that now so frequently drowns out the voice of reason.
As usual, Kant said it best: “Deficiency in judgment is what is properly called stupidity; and for such a failing there is, regrettably, no remedy.”

Exactly, precisely so. 

When dealing with AI, always revert to Kant, born in  Königsberg in the Kingdom of Prussia in April 1724 for the final word ...

Is there an infallible Pope in the house?

With the reptiles continuing to spoof the intermittent archive, the pond's range of reptile references continues to be limited.

The Australian Daily Zionist News couldn't resist this big lie ...

Luckily the reptiles used AP as their source, so correspondents could head off to other versions of the big lie, as at France24, Israel must win 'because we’ve got no other choice’, PM Netanyahu tells UN

There was much lying and disingenuous downplaying ...

...Netanyahu dismissed incidents of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as a “handful of young juvenile delinquents” throwing stones, chopping down olive trees and lighting fires.
“I can’t stand that. I won’t stand for vigilantism,” the prime minister said before accusing foreign leaders and the international press of distorting the scale of violence in the West Bank.
Netanyahu’s government is dominated by settlers and their allies, including the Cabinet minister who oversees the police. There have been few arrests of settlers involved in attacks on Palestinians.
Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, and the Palestinians want both as part of their future state. The Palestinians and much of the international community view the settlements as illegal and as an obstacle to creating a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.
Netanyahu has said no Palestinian state will be established while he is Israel’s leader and has argued that the Palestinian Authority is not a partner for peace.

Says the man devoted to the war with Iran and as many other conflicts as he can muster.

So keen was the pond to pander to the pretentious referential pundit that it didn't even bother checking out other worthy contenders, eager for attention. But there was one on the extreme far right of the reptile rag that caught the eye ...

The header: By Peter O'Brien
No place in shrine for questionable frontier history

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5 min

The caption for the snap designed to produce sympathy: A Last Post Ceremony at the Australian War Memorial Picture: David Whittaker

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At last the knave behind the fuss stepped forward:

I am the co-convener of the Defend Sacred Ground campaign, which aims to put a stop to the inclusion of frontier conflict in the Australian War Memorial. Former PM Tony Abbott is our patron.

The onion muncher is your patron? Let the pond be clear, contempt is the first response, together with the thought that this must be black bashing of a familiar ancient English colonial kind ...

Let me be clear; we do accept that frontier conflict occurred, that it was traumatic for the Aboriginal people and, often, illegal. We do accept that parts of it are a stain on our history. But the AWM is not the place to record it. The AWM is first and foremost a shrine – a sacred place to honour those who gave their lives in the service of this nation. Its museum and research functions are subordinate to that purpose. The AWM is not a war museum. It is not a history museum.
I have no doubt there are some, among the cohort pushing for inclusion of frontier conflict, who are genuine in their belief that this is an overdue and benign acknowledgment of our warts-and-all history. But the history being discussed is by no means settled. One narrative that has been widely and credulously accepted is that up to 100,000 Aborigines died in these so-called “Frontier Wars”. That figure is not supported by any empirical evidence. It has no place in the War Memorial.
If you hand your enemy a weapon, don’t be surprised if he uses it. Those well-meaning people will not be consulted when an activist minority in the Aboriginal community seizes upon this and trumpets it as an official acknowledgment that Australia was invaded, that the peaceful Aboriginal population was subjected to dispossession and genocide resulting in trauma that persists to this day. In short, that the nation-state of Australia is illegitimate.

Note the canny way that the war is reduced to a "frontier conflict" and images designed to terrify the hive mind are included ... People from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and their supporters protesting at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 2014 Picture: Kym Smith

The pond was startled by the sense of a Colonel Blimp outraged that anyone would think to honour the fuzzy wuzzies ...

Their intermediate aim is for a Tomb of the Unknown Aboriginal Warrior to be placed next to the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier. Who knows what after that?
That this AWM proposal is contentious, and that the AWM Council is aware of this, cannot be in doubt. Prominent people have been speaking out about it since at least 2022.
In a recent piece in this newspaper, AWM director Matt Anderson states: “Before the development began, we consulted nationally, and the feedback was overwhelming: Australians expect difficult content in our galleries.” If you don’t remember being consulted, it’s probably because you are not a member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community or a suitably vetted historian. As far as we can tell, that is the extent of the consultation undertaken by the AWM.
It is likely that most Australians would oppose this proposal, if given the chance. But until now, they have not been given that chance. And they should have been, because what is proposed is, on the face of it, in contravention of the Australian War Memorial Act 1980.

Just to alienate the pond even more, an image of the onion muncher, patron of all that demeans .. Former PM Tony Abbott at an Anzac Day service in 2026. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

More knaves came forward ...

One of my co-conveners, Robert Hill, wrote to Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh to raise this issue. He received a reply from director Anderson, dismissing our concerns and stating that “the Frontier Wars gallery will focus on organised campaigns of war and warlike resistance conducted between First Nations peoples and naval or military forces raised by the crown in Australia, in line with the AWM Act”.
We understand that the Council’s assertion that the proposal is in line with the Act is not based on independent legal advice but, as AWM chairman Kim Beazley has stated, on a “broad interpretation” of the Act. That would be a tenable approach if a) the Act were ambiguous, and b) the desired outcome were either in line with the clear intent of parliament or, alternatively, it now reflected an overwhelming and verifiable consensus among the Australian people. None of those conditions applies here.

The reprehensible "Bomber" was part of the act ... Chairman of the AWM, Kim Beazley, in Canberra in 2024 Picture: Martin Ollman

There came the usual mealy mouthed platitudes ...

We did seek advice, from barrister Peter King of Queen’s Square Chambers in Sydney. His advice raises serious questions as to the current proposal.
The Council members may be quite genuine in their desire to seek “justice” for Aboriginal people and present a true account of our history, but it cannot be said that they have acted in good faith.
Rather than seek independent legal advice and put the matter beyond doubt, or at least give themselves a figleaf of credibility, they have relied on their own “broad interpretation” to further their own agenda. And they did this knowing that the matter is highly contested. Surely it is incumbent for chairman Beazley, as the statutory custodian of our national shrine of remembrance, to ensure everything is above board. The Australian War Memorial belongs to all Australians.
We call upon minister Keogh to direct the Council to remove all current depictions of frontier conflict, and to abandon its plans for the new Pre-1914 Gallery. As a minister of the crown, it is his duty to enforce the legislation.
Let me make one final point. We do not oppose this proposal because it is contrary to the Act. We oppose it, in principle, because it is a bad, divisive idea.
Lieutenant Colonel (rtd) Peter O’Brien is a Vietnam veteran and author of five books.

defendsacredground.com

An actual colonel? The pond has seen this kind before ...

All the same, the blather fell on fertile hive mind soil ...

You're a long way from Texas Jack, but you sound dumb as a stick with your proposal to disenfranchise those killed in wars after the first world ding dong ...

The pond wouldn't usually do this but feels the need to introduce a little counter balance. 

These came by way of The Canberra Times Echnida newsletter, which arrives as emails each morning, and as well as carrying an infallible Pope, delivers opinions more compelling than the lizard Oz ...

Well yes, there was an invasion, a war and an extermination, and there was more in that newsletter, but that was the nub of it, and Ellery followed up almost immediately with another effort ...

And so on, and so to a bonus.

Here time pressures caught up with the pond and it had to continue on in screen cap form ...

How could the pond resist The Times (of London, don't you know) dealing with Vlad the Sociopath ...

What a relief. Europe is safe!

Pity about Ukraine, but there's always got to be a loser, wot wot ...

Oh dear, the pond might have spoken too soon. Perhaps Vlad the Sociopath, in his desperation, might actually lash out ...

Surely the main thing is that plucky Britain is safe from any turmoil roiling Europe. Let's just keep it at all things Ukrainian ...

At this point, the reptiles delivered a set of sub-headlines ...

Discord on public messaging? The same might be pretty much said about this hot-cold-lukewarm analysis ...

There came a last gobbet ...

At the end of it all, the pond remained even more convinced that Europe was made up of patsies about as capable of confronting Vlad the sociopath as a warm lettuce leaf trying to stand firm, or as brave as mad King Donald, wilting in the glow of the latest Chinese emperor ...

Speaking of social media ... there's a site where The Times (of London) pushes a strong anti-Vlad the Sociopath line ...

Meanwhile, the Lord Haw-Haws keep doing their work ...

Lloydie of the Amazon, the bromancer, Geoff, petulant Peta, Killer ... what a reptile line up ...

 

Like the ancient kraken, waking from the deep, or perhaps like a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, Lloydie of the Amazon has woken from his slumbers and turned up to celebrate Dan "the man" Tehan ...

But there seems to be some kind of induced energy lethargy, because Lloydie could only manage two brief gobbets, as he celebrated the deep north's commitment to the coal industry - what could possibly go wrong? - a return of the climate wars, and pending victory on action on climate change via "pragmatic common sense": 

Ah, got to make the planet safe for the lizard Oz's "superintelligent" answers to everything, though "42" would save a lot of coal.

The pond asks again, what on earth could go wrong, and luckily had saved up an infallible Pope to provide an answer ...

Meanwhile, the bromancer decided to revert to full Trumpism, and what could possibly go wrong?

Read that line and weep: "On policy substance, most of the merit rests with Trump".

Muh lud, is there a counterpoint? 

Well, you could turn to Paul Krugman, in a missive which came to the pond via email but which could be found on Substack here ...

Well yes, all that and more at the link, with musical coda, and what a relief to find there's some sanity left in America, but sadly not in the bromancer ...

Rest easy, tech bros, the bromancer has your backs ...

Or better still, imagine the reptiles in charge ... if you dare ...

And so it's back to that tired old both siderism, "Trump has done good and bad things", and it's all the fault of left wing critics and never mind those who have avoided ideology and retained a shred of sanity ...

Very early this morning, this was the headline that greeted the pond ...

The reptiles never sleep, but the pond thought it should at least allow Geoff to chamber his round ...

Almost bromancerish - there can be no higher praise - what with that agitation about lefties taking a view on the mad king ...

Geoff continued his dirge ...as a snap showed the extreme distance Albo had put between himself and the Donald ...

Finally it was time to moan about awards ...

All this posing in public? What could possibly go wrong?

And so to the problem of Petulant Peta.

With the intermittent archive on the blink, or at least being spoofed by the lizard Oz, the pond's usual tactic - a note observing her presence, a quick despatch to the intermittent archive, and moving on - won't work.

At the same time, it's incredibly easy to offer up some screen caps as a reminder of the power behind the throne which led to the early demise of the hapless onion muncher's reign.

The pond realises that screen caps have no charm, and are just deployed in the pond's current never ending moving emergency, which will continue for some weeks.

They're just a brutalist way of flinging together a blog post quickly, but time is short, and the petulant one is all on board with the Dan "the man", and so attention of some kind had to be paid ...

The pond realises that a triumphant Petulant Peta can become an unnerving, nauseating experience - that talk of "climate nonsense" being consigned to history might send those with the slightest awareness of science spiralling out of control, but the pond promises that it will be done and dusted in three gobbets, and that the furriner bashing is up there, or more correctly, down there with Dame Groan ...

Where would the reptiles be without furriners to bash? (But then where would Herr Adolf have been without "cosmopolitans" to bash?)

Cue a stern-looking beefy boofhead to set up the final gobbet ...

There, done in three gobbets, and no damage done, apart from the odd rush to the toilet for a heave.

What an inspiration for those into fear, loathing and general hysteria the petulant one is, and what an inspiration King Donald is ...

Finally, it would be remiss of the pond to overlook Killer, what with Killer eager to blame those at some disadvantage for ruining everything.

Don't you worry about the meek and the mild and the suffering, just set Killer on to them and he'll worry them to an early death, like a dog sensing blood with a lamb in the Tamworth sun ...

From the pond's observation of those who've made a living doing hard yards yakka, 65 can still be a stretch. 

The shearers in the pond's extended family all developed back problems that made life extremely hard in their later years, and the pond guesses that the worst Killer has suffered is the occasional wrist and finger strain from extended keyboard use ...but that's the name of the Killer game. If you've spent a life doing manual labour, you're a disposable item.

The real players, the contented oldies, are generally are rich as Croesus in Killer's world ... we are all Lydians now:

If the pond has one wish left, it's that Killer gets old, but the pond guesses that he's managed to build a nice nest egg, and to hell to those left behind ...and what's a little tendonitis in the wrist?

Now on with bashing unfortunates who might be on struggle street for one reason or another:

Back to sheltered workshops, you heathens and bludgers, Killer of the IPA has spoken ...

And so to the immortal Rowe to round out this day's offerings ...and what could possibly go wrong?

That really is a truly noble chair ...

So many temptations ...

So many audio distractions ...

Dame Slap doing white working class boys? Niall in the depressive phase? Dan 'the man' Tehan promising to nuke the country? Is that all there is, my friend, is that all there is?

Is there any reason whatsoever for ACMA to exist?

Not being a regular watcher of the ABC, the pond only stumbled across the Media Watch report on the latest ACMA folly on YouTube. (Here on the ABC site).

It might seem like the program is offering a home town defence of a Four Corners show about the decidedly incompetent - and inclined to militarism - Australian War Memorial.

But consider this. The program aired back in March 2005 and the ACMA ruling only surfaced in September 2006. WTF? Talk about a warm lettuce leaf slapping delivered way after the event. 

Not that the pond saw the original, but even if it had, only fragments would remain lodged in the noggin by the time ACMA rose from its swamp to pick a safe target (while the Murdochians gaily romp in the swamp).

As for the components of the ruling aired on Media Watch, they were pathetic and risible, an indication that, whoever wrote them (a cuddle of cardigan wearers?), not one of them had the first clue about journalism or the making of a TV program.

The pond is no defender of 4 Corners, and rarely watches it. The tragically inept Mahmood Fazal affair diminished the show, and its latest attempt at Chinese EV bashing held no appeal.

It was the "Chinese" in the story that alerted the pond to the way that the ABC frequently recycles talking points that appear in the lizard Oz and other tabloid publications. The focus on "Chinese" revived the lizard Oz's age-old fear of a war with China by Xmas, and when hooked up with the ABC's general fear of EV, it becomes rabid.

All EV makers harvest data, and if Comrade Xi can plan his invasion of Australia by utilising the data from the pond tooling around the mighty 'Gong in a Geely EX5, he's welcome.

Tesla is a typical example. Back in the day Uncle Leon's mob got caught out bigly:

...between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees, opens new tab privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.
Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers, opens new tab in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.
Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.
Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees. (Much more at Reuters here).

Back in the day, a pond gas guzzling Merc work car collected an unseemly amount of data, stored for mechanics to observe here, and for the car to send back home.

The pond is perfectly happy for a general story about privacy and data in all kinds of vehicles, including EVs. BYD, for example, is inclined to be cowboy (or girl), and if a little prodding forces some changes, what the heck. But the ABC's relentless bashing of EVs makes it a branch office of the lizard Oz.

While letting off steam, could the pond also ask correspondents not to send links to Catholic publications, not that the stories can't be amusing. 

Sure it's fun to know that some tykes are into drag: Swiss diocese defends drag show as ‘kickoff’ for new format

The Swiss Catholic chaplaincy organising a drag show this week has told the Catholic Herald that the show is the “kickoff” of the drag show format as further events are already planned, while rejecting the idea it is establishing a “series” of drag shows.  
As reported earlier this week by the Catholic Herald, a Catholic chaplaincy in the Diocese of St. Gallen is hosting a drag show on September 18, designed to “combine the art form of drag with social, spiritual, and cultural issues.” It will feature two male drag performers and an interview with the men conducted by an employee of the diocese as part of the “deep drag” format, which joins drag with conversation.  

But to get the full story you have to give up your email address to create a free account, and the be endlessly pestered by the tyke Herald.

Besides, for years, the pond mocked the Pellists for doing 'deep drag' via their attraction to a splendid array of 'deep frocks', while giving other cross dressers a hard time.

And the pond must now confess that's all by way of a filibuster, because again this day the pond is on house moving duties, so the coverage of the lizard Oz must be limited to screen caps.

First up might not even be seen by some as commentary, because it arose from the risible lizard Oz energy "summit", but simply because the climate science denying reptiles presented it with a straight face as "news" doesn't make it so.

Dan "the man" Tehan was at it again, and how the reptiles loved it ...

Now correspondents will likely have been exhausted already by the reptiles endless bashing of renewables, and even the most paltry efforts to do something about the climate crisis, but it's worth observing exactly how they've managed to infest the coalition ... running in fear from Gina's pampered pet ...

Could there possibly be a lizard Oz story about climate change that didn't feature demonic windmills? The question is purely rhetorical ...

So the notion of nuking the country to save the planet gets another run around the park.

Could there possibly be a lizard Oz story about renewables that didn't feature Satan's little helper, leering like a diabolical figure? The question is purely rhetorical ...

He refused to commit? What a prize loon he is ...and as for the lizard Oz's role in this farrago of nonsense, who could disagree?

On with other matters, and again the pond reluctantly must cut short coverage, not helped by the reptiles currently spoofing of the intermittent archive.

The pond certainly didn't want to discuss the working class with rabid bigot Dame Slap, but as time was short, there was no choice ...

Dame Slap is more than Pauline curious, Dame Slap is right on board ...if she happened to be in Germany at the moment, her bleating about white working class boys would entirely suit the AfD. 

It's also not particularly original ...

 

Joanna Williams! Spiked!

But enough already, there's two more gobbets of bleating to go, and if you guessed that Tamworth's eternal shame will turn up, you get a gold star ...

And if you guessed that Pauline herself would certainly appear in pictorial form, perhaps you've been infected by the lizard Oz hive mind virus.

The way it's framed in this kind of tribute is to make the tribute sound a little back-handed: "At least One Nation has started a debate here."

It's a way of being devoted to the One Nation agenda of bigotry and fear, while purporting to be a little distant. 

Fling in a "crude" and an "unsubtle", but then go all in ... she's really right, you know, as any MAGA cap-donning Dame would know ...

Hard to disagree ... but what a cruel irony he should be talking about the MAGA-cap donning Dame ...

Sorry, the pond had intended to insert a cartoon for a bit of a breather ...

And so to the bonus, and this is day old, but in its day it was given a big splash ...

Niall is one of those prize loons that the pond finds irresistible ...

Perhaps it's because he's a manic depressive as well as a man of strange inclinations and insights. 

Last October for example, he said this in an interview here ... Niall Ferguson: Trump’s Handling of Russia and China Will Define US Power  (Ia Meurmishvili October 17, 2025)

...President Trump is respected in the wider region.
He’s respected in particular in the Gulf. They know that he takes them seriously, partly because he’s a businessman, but also I think because, intuitively, President Trump understands that in the Middle East, there is no way of getting respect other than through strength. So he does have real leverage, not only with respect to Israel, but also with respect to the Arabs. And I think in particular, the Qataris have been crucial here. Qatar has sheltered the leadership of Hamas, played a distinctly ambiguous role, it must be said, over the last two years. But without Qatar, it wouldn’t have been possible to get Hamas to sign this deal.
One has to acknowledge that one of the distinguishing features of Trump’s presidency is that he brings strength and a kind of business sense to every negotiation that he enters into. It’s got a lot harder for his critics and haters to say that’s not real after what we’ve just seen.

You get the drift, completely delusional, and yet with a patina of substance, a veneer hiding the intellectual chipboard beneath the surface ...

In this outing in the lizard Oz, he'd shifted from Trump mania to depression ...

How much of this should be taken as insight?

Check out a few other points in that interview ...

...it’s only when President Putin recognizes that the costs to him of continuing this war are greater than the costs of settling that we will get to a real peace negotiation. 
I don’t rule this out. I think ultimately the Ukrainians are inflicting meaningful damage on Russia’s energy infrastructure and that will take its toll if it is sustained. On the other hand, Russia is inflicting real damage on Ukrainian cities with nightly air raids, and the drone war on both sides is constantly scaling up. I think Putin still thinks he can win this. I think he still believes he can grind out one of those Russian victories that relies on manpower and readiness to take casualties. That’s why he’s not particularly serious about negotiation. But there comes a point when we can make the costs to him too high for him to continue. And that’s the key, I think, to what President Trump has to do in the remainder of this year and into next year. Real pressure needs to be applied before we get to the spring and summer of next year, because I worry a lot about the manpower imbalance. Russia is recruiting fresh reserves for its infantry. Ukraine is not. A war like this can’t be fought exclusively by drones. You do need infantry and that’s where I think Ukraine is most vulnerable.

He's up and down and all over the place like a yo-yo walking the dog ...

...We’ve seen a big change in his tone towards President Putin, particularly since the fiasco of the Alaska summit. Let’s hope we hear more of that. I don’t think Tomahawks are the key here. I think the key is President Putin understanding that he has blown it, that he is now somebody who’s standing in the White House has been really reduced and that the Trump administration no longer sees him as somebody they need to conciliate. I think if that message is conveyed—”you had your chance and you blew it”—then he’s going have to think very hard about what he does next year.

Back to the current outing ...

And at that point he began to lather himself up into a fever ... and there were a full four gobbets to go ...

Threading through it all was a profoundly depressive form of defeatism, something Vlad the Sociopath's advisers might hand to him as being suitable for mention on Russian state media ...

We're all sick of Vlad the Sociopath's war.

But what's the alternative? Let his goons run roughshod over Ukraine and establish a dicatorship that sees their culture revert to the bad old days of the Soviets?

By this point, the pond regretted diving in, but never mind, feel the length, as every saucy doubt and fear gushed into the reptile void ...

Doom and gloom everywhere, and yet the pond suddenly felt an enormous sense of relief, a rushing in of light, because this was the last gobbet ...

What else to say? Well, it's true that this was just reheated stew that ran in The Sunday Times ...

A harsh truth: the strain is on Ukraine.
A flagging economy, circling rivals and unpalatable peace proposals are putting President Zelensky under enormous pressure. Winter is full of foreboding
Friday September 18 2026 ...

The pond doesn't have a clue why the local reptiles ignored the Banksy angle, perhaps because it was completely out of tune with depressive Niall's report.

More to the point, it appeared on the same day in Bari's old mob, a fitting place for the blather that Niall offered.

You need to hand over an email to go there, so perhaps the reptiles of Oz were hoping no one noticed the sort of company they keep ...

That reminds the pond. How's Bari herself going?

Ousted ‘60 Minutes’ Producer Rips Bari Weiss Over Ratings Flop

Bari Weiss’ overhaul of 60 Minutes sees season premiere hit 25-year ratings low

Great. Maybe karma is a thing ...

So how does valiant Europe help the Ukrainians?

Let a couple of Russian oligarchs off the hook.

Ah, the perfidious French ...

"Is that all there is?

Is that all there is?

If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing

Let's break out the booze and have a ball

If that's all there is"