In which the pond has sundry Barbie and X-rated moments before finally tackling the "Ned" Everest ...

 

With not the slightest hint of regret or any inclination to offer an apology, the pond decided it couldn't go there ... not to a movie titled The Blonde and the Liar and the Indigenous Child Used As A Warm Prop ... though the reptiles had the movie screening at the top of the page in both the tree killer and digital editions..

It seemed at least mildly ironic that at the time the reptiles featured a story urging an Indigenous watchdog with teeth, Dame Slap was trotting out a lying rodent to urge on the denial of a Voice ...

The pond's unhappiness then extended to the comments section ...

Not the doddering Doddser, or even worse, Monsieur Dupont on the US alliance ...

The pond dipped into Monsieur Dupont and down the bottom of the page came across this line ...

Authoritarian states will always target liberal democracies because they feel threatened by our example. Given a choice, most people will choose to live in open, tolerant and cosmopolitan societies.

Um, actually most members of the GOP and viewers of Faux Noise and supporters of News Corp prefer authoritarian figures intent on producing a blinkered view of history down there with foreign ministers inclined to be disappeared in dictatorships ...

The pond found it hard to take Monsieur Dupont seriously when it came across this tag ...

Alan Dupont is chief executive of geopolitical risk consultancy The Cognoscenti Group.

The Cognoscenti Group!? Yes, it really is a thing and you can read about it here ... but have you thought about the benefits of repeatedly hitting your head with a hammer instead?

With it looking like the pond might decide on a strategic withdrawal for the day, the pond looked beneath the reptile fold. 

Fatal mistake, because there was a cartoon of the most insidious kind ...

At first the pond thought the obvious thing to do was to fight fire with fire and respond with a cartoon ...

There were any number of cartoons to hand ...

But then the pond began to brood, always a mistake, and a nanosecond's look around the intertubes found this in the EPA here (with graphs, figures, yadda yadda) ...

The extent of area burned by wildfires each year appears to have increased since the 1980s. According to National Interagency Fire Center data, of the 10 years with the largest acreage burned, all have occurred since 2004, including the peak year in 2015 (see Figure 2). This period coincides with many of the warmest years on record nationwide (see the U.S. and Global Temperature indicator). The largest increases have occurred during the spring and summer months.

Then there was this in a Nature paper ...

Fire activity in Australia is strongly affected by high inter-annual climate variability and extremes. Through changes in the climate, anthropogenic climate change has the potential to alter fire dynamics. Here we compile satellite (19 and 32 years) and ground-based (90 years) burned area datasets, climate and weather observations, and simulated fuel loads for Australian forests. Burned area in Australia’s forests shows a linear positive annual trend but an exponential increase during autumn and winter. The mean number of years since the last fire has decreased consecutively in each of the past four decades, while the frequency of forest megafire years (>1 Mha burned) has markedly increased since 2000. The increase in forest burned area is consistent with increasingly more dangerous fire weather conditions, increased risk factors associated with pyroconvection, including fire-generated thunderstorms, and increased ignitions from dry lightning, all associated to varying degrees with anthropogenic climate change.

Then there was this at NASA, a little old, but things have only got worse since it was written ...

Since 1880, the world has warmed by 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.09 degrees Celsius), with the five warmest years on record occurring in the last five years. Since the 1980s, the wildfire season has lengthened across a quarter of the world's vegetated surface, and in some places like California, fire has become nearly a year-round risk. The year 2018 was California's worst wildfire season on record, on the heels of a devasting 2017 fire season. In 2019, wildfires have already burned 2.5 million acres in Alaska in an extreme fire season driven by high temperatures, which have also led to massive fires in Siberia.
Whether started naturally or by people, fires worldwide and the resulting smoke emissions and burned areas have been observed by NASA satellites from space for two decades. Combined with data collected and analyzed by scientists and forest managers on the ground, researchers at NASA, other U.S. agencies and universities are beginning to draw into focus the interplay between fires, climate and humans.
"Our ability to track fires in a concerted way over the last 20 years with satellite data has captured large-scale trends, such as increased fire activity, consistent with a warming climate in places like the western U.S., Canada and other parts of Northern Hemisphere forests where fuels are abundant," said Doug Morton, chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Where warming and drying climate has increased the risk of fires, we’ve seen an increase in burning."

And that's when the pond became enlightened. 

The reptiles couldn't handle the truth, they had no idea of the truth. And the pond had been reduced to arguing with a wretched, profoundly stupid cartoon, drawn by a loon for a loonatic readership ... while over at the Graudian you might read Gulf stream could collapse as early as 2025, study suggests.

Meanwhile, all the things that had amused the pond in the last little while were still crying out for attention ...

Ben Shapiro's deeply weird meltdown about the Barbie movie produced great fun from Erin Gloria Ryan in 'Barbie' Seems to Have Destroyed Ben Shapiro ...

When he described the blockbuster film thusly: “It’s as though you were going to make Toy Story except the toys are all evil, they’re all bad, and you’re supposed to hate them and you’re supposed to burn them.” I thought: Ben, are you OK? Show me where the doll hurt you.

And so on, and the Barbie fuss has been a boon for cartoonists as well ...

Then there was the matter of the X-rated Uncle Elon, which has been producing XXXX branding fun, and the pond will fall off the wagon to drink to that ...

Now that's entertainment, and if you haven't used up your clicks, try Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic with Why Elon Killed the Bird ... just a teaser, with minimal spoilers ...

...Unlike Facebook’s pivot to Meta, which was oriented around a real (though flawed and unappealing) virtual-reality product, X is a rebrand built on little more than a vague collection of buzzwords cobbled together to form a complete sentence. On Sunday, Yaccarino described the forthcoming app as “the future state of unlimited interactivity” that is “centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.” She also noted that, “powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.” (Yaccarino did not respond to a request for comment.)
Her tweet is a near-perfect example of business-dude lorem ipsum—corporate gibberish that sounds superficially intelligent but is actually obfuscating. What is “unlimited interactivity?” How will X be “powered by AI”? Does she mean generative AI like ChatGPT or standard algorithms of the sort that have powered Twitter’s “For you” feed for years? The particulars are irrelevant: The words just need to sound like something when strung together.
Musk, too, is guilty of such blabber. He has argued that his hypothetical project, if built correctly, could “become half of the global financial system.” This is the empty language of a dilettante, the equivalent of me telling you that this article, if written correctly, is on pace to win the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, or that I am the executive wordsmith for The Atlantic’s Words About Computers section.

No doubt there'll also be a surge of cartoons ...

What's that? Is the pond going to feature at least one reptile? Knuckle down, do the hard yards, climb the usual Everest?

Well nattering "Ned" is back, which is a deep disappointment. The pond thought he might have quietly retired, or done an imitation of Alice's Cheshire cat, and all that was left was a trace of desiccated coconut in the tree ...

If it must be done, then it must be done and the pond should get on with the doing, though it's full of the usual huge illustrations, devised as a distraction ...

Okay, okay, the pond understands the use of the third person, but that's because this is an anonymous blog shamelessly trading off on an iconic name.

Is there any excuse for that excruciating abuse of the English language, in "Interviewed by this column".

Nope, on even the simplest level, the column didn't do the interviewing, it was nattering "Ned" wot done it, faithfully regurgitating the words of others, as is his wont, as a way of filling the ether and the full to overflowing intertubes with verbiage ...

As for the snaps, the pond decided to adopt its recent trend and throw them into a pile ...

Now when you see a trigger word in what follows, deploy them as you wish ... you couldn't do any worse than what remains of a truly desperate and pathetic lizard Oz graphics department ...

It also means that some of "Ned's" gobbets are a little reduced in size ...

What to do with the gaps produced by the absence of those snaps?

Well the pond thought it might deploy an infallible Pope for the lolz ...

Then it was back for more regurgitating "Ned" ...

So much verbiage, so little time, but instead of an inadequate polity, how about an adequate immortal Rowe, also on a Barbie jag ...

It's old news, but the headlines give a clue ...

There's The Conversation ... and The Graudian for those who've done their time with "Ned" and decided to call it quits ... and learn of wayward Victorians, and eek, Comrade Dan ...

And quick as a flash, the pond was at the penultimate "Ned" gobbet, and only a short sprint from the summit ...

The pond supposes it's at least sleep-inducing material, always needed in the winter months, and better than what's on offer in the United States by way of learning experiences and teaching materials...

But the pond will admit a sigh of relief at having reached the final gobbet, with both Jimbo and "Ned" adept at sending the pond to sleep ...

Actually, the chief challenge is to stay awake during a "Ned" sermon ... with the pond never having mastered the knack, and not having a clue how to get it ...

Meanwhile, on another planet far removed from reptile la la land ... though it might help to read  Morrison government struck secret deal to pay PNG to take refugees and asylum seekers as a primer ...